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IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.

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Recent Reviews

IBM Cognos Analytics

8 out of 10
March 20, 2024
Incentivized
This technology is a great way for our business to see the scope of the work we are doing in one large dashboard. The data driven insights …
Continue reading
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 30 features
  • Formatting capabilities (104)
    8.1
    81%
  • Drill-down analysis (103)
    8.1
    81%
  • Report Delivery Scheduling (102)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (101)
    7.8
    78%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
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Pricing

View all pricing

On Demand - Standard

$10.00

Cloud
per month per user

On Demand - Premium

$40.00

On Premise
per month per user

Entry-level set up fee?

  • Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://www.ibm.com/products/cognos…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Starting price (does not include set up fee)

  • $10 per month per user
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Product Demos

IBM Cognos Analytics Product Tour

Walnut.io
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.9
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.1
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.3
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

8.1
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.3
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

7.3
Avg 8.0

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

7.5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is IBM Cognos Analytics?

Cognos Analytics is an AI-fueled business intelligence platform that supports the entire analytics cycle, from discovery to operationalization. Cognos Analytics gives users — whether data scientist, business analyst or non-specialist — more power to perform relevant analysis in a way that ties back to organizational objectives. It aims to shorten each user’s journey from simple to sophisticated analytics, allowing them to harness data to explore the unknown, identify new relationships, get a deeper understanding of outcomes and challenge the status quo. Users can visualize, analyze and share actionable insights about data with anyone in the organization.


IBM Cognos Analytics Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: ETL Capability
  • Supported: ETL Scheduler

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features

  • Supported: REST API
  • Supported: Javascript API

Additional Features

  • Supported: AI Forecasting

IBM Cognos Analytics Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android
Supported CountriesGlobal
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, Urdu, Farsi

Frequently Asked Questions

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.

IBM Cognos Analytics starts at $10.

Tableau Public, Tableau Server, and Microsoft Power BI are common alternatives for IBM Cognos Analytics.

Reviewers rate Publish to PDF highest, with a score of 8.7.

The most common users of IBM Cognos Analytics are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(580)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 27)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Paige Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is the perfect software to collect data without manual procedures, we will continue to use it since it has the appropriate functions so that we can easily view all our information thanks to the intuitive reports.
March 16, 2016

IBM Cognos

Hirdesh Gupta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
IBM Cognos is evolving, they are adding new features which might be missing in previous versions and keeping it on the go to meet customer demands.
September 30, 2015

God Knows or Cognos

Sachin Karkun | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.
March 16, 2015

Meghdeep

Meghdeep Raval, PMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It would be great if there were better performance monitoring activities like those available in Microstrategy.

It would also be great if there were an option to rename columns and query subjects without modifying all existing reports.
Dwight Taylor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It took my BI team one year to become productive at developing useful content on the IBM Cognos platform. After this year, the reports being developed for a client were stale and no longer relative to the ever changing needs of the business client. Given the same opportunity, I would select a platform that allows the team to quickly produce BI content. Fail fast and recover quickly!
Francisco Prieto | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are heavily tied to IBM with other portions of the business so don't foresee us breaking off completely from their offering, however a better statement would be to say that we will be scaling back some of the functionality we pay for today.
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
As stated before, this system is a requirement for report creation in our Enterprise Asset Management system, so it will automatically be renewed when we renew the support for the EAM system. It is really that cut and dry. I would not renew this particular product if I was able to use a different report writer.
Joseph Frank, PhD, CCP, GWCCM | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are well-established as an Enterprise user of Cognos, so I am sure WUSTL IS&T will continue using it for years to come. Eventually, it will replace WebFocus for legacy reporting.
Martin Rivera | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
IBM's current investment in IBM Cognos Business Analytics tools are in the process of taking the product suite from already being a leader in the market place, to truly standing out in the cutting edge of the Business Analytics platform arena. The last 2 or 3 releases alone have shown staggering improvements in the areas of visualizations, mobile capabilities, and customization. The future for IBM Cognos is surely to be a positive one, given the direction that IBM is taking its product suite, and I certainly look forward to being a part of it.
Michael Cedor | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Since using Cognos and seeing how easy it is to work with and to learn, I don't ever want to go back to something else. It is accurate, deep, and works right away when you need it to. There are several options that work with various internal tools to help enhance your report and make it more presentable to clients who are looking forward to having it. PFG, and other companies as well may have this, has a dedicated support staff on site that helps with any questions or issues, and the turnaround for fixing them is almost immediate. If you know what you are looking for and understand how Cognos helps bring a cluster of information together, you will see the benefits that it will bring your company and department. Cognos almost pays for itself.
Robert Goodman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We will continue to use IBM Cognos to support our student community. In other areas of the university, Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services has become a cost effective alternative. That being said, the Report and Query Studio tools of Cognos still remain superior and will bring business benefit to Georgetown for many years to come.
October 31, 2013

Cognos review

Brian Schwartz | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It's been a really helpful tool to determine key peformance indicators and metrics including but not limited to new clients acquired, new client spend, lifetime value of clients as well as registration to paid client conversion rates.
October 31, 2013

IBM Cognos Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Cognos works well in the current environment. Business likes to use it due to the ease of use especially around the self service Cognos Powerplay cubes. It will not be easy to migrate to a different platform and re-train the business users. Additional tools from Cognos in 10.2 is also exciting and G|R will be trying to leverage them for our strategy. Given, this background, we are likely to continue with Cognos in the near future.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Partially because of the great product, but partially because we are so entrenched with money and human capital that we are almost certainly going to renew.
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