Solid reporting tool with some missing capabilities
April 02, 2018

Solid reporting tool with some missing capabilities

Gonzalo Angeleri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Modules Used

  • Report Studio

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos

We use Cognos to meet all reporting and analysis needs of our customers. It's normally used across the entire organization, though with some customers, it is used in a particular department. Cognos allows users to create and distribute reports as well as analyze information to find insights and make better decisions.

Pros

  • No coding skills to build reports
  • Easily integrates multiple data sources
  • Powerful report capabilities
  • Analysis, reporting, dashboarding and score carding support

Cons

  • Self-service capabilities are behind the competition
  • Too many interfaces to build models and reports which are not integrated
  • Visualization capabilities
In my opinion, MicroStrategy has a better product architecture. As a reporting and analysis platform, MicroStrategy allows developers to build reports and dashboards using an integrated development tool for all capabilities. It also has a more powerful and easy to use self-service functionality.
On the other hand, Cognos has a better integration with other IBM products such as SPSS which gives powerful data mining capabilities.
Depending on customer needs we recommend Cognos or other tools.
Although Cognos has support for most relational sources, it has some limitation with some non-relational or non-structural data sources.
Cognos has some good report delivery capabilities that can be triggered by time or by the event.
Cognos is well suited for corporate reporting and analysis where IT department is in charge of building reports and dashboards in batch or near real-time. Cognos is not appropriate for real-time reporting and where you are looking for a self-service tool for end users.

IBM Cognos Analytics Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
6.7
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
6
7.3
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7
Report sharing and collaboration
6
7.8
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Delivery to Remote Servers
7
7.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Predictive Analytics
7
8.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
6.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Mobile Application
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
6.4
REST API
6
Javascript API
7
iFrames
6
Java API
6
Themeable User Interface (UI)
7

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