Powerful tool for enterprise grade structured reporting
February 10, 2026
Powerful tool for enterprise grade structured reporting
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Report Studio
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cognos Analytics
I use IBM Cognos Analytics for its business intelligence (BI) functionality in complex reports preparation, data analysis, dashboard formulations, and monitoring business unit's sales performance over the period. IBM Cognos Analytics, helped us in solving various problems ranging from manual reports creation leading lost of hours of turnaround and human error, dealing with data silos within various departments, delay in decision making. Bing business analyst, my scope of use case for Cognos centres around turning scattered data into actionable insights by creating sales insights reports, interactive dashboards for seniors consumption, and data exploration, validation, analysis and storytelling.
Pros
- Enterprise reporting - Create, customise, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, etc.
- Dashboard creation and data exploration & analysis - Using drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualisation. Additionally, using AI powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input (formation of pie, bar, line charts). It's useful for no-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheet data to get quick answers.
- Building insights for accurate decision making - Package reports with data backed insights for stakeholders in pdf, and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting and strategic recommendations on relevant asks.
Cons
- Limited real-time data connectivity - IBM Cognos Analytics relay on scheduled data refresh leading issues in real-time or streaming data access, especially for live sales data updates.
- End point experience (Mobility) - Although it supports mobile but its experience can be improved as the app is not fully responsive or fluid like interactive filtering and dashboard creation are not user-friendly on small screen. It would be great if mobile UX is improved with better touch friendly controls and offline viewing options.
- Limited data blending - There exist some struggle to blend or join data from different sources on the fly. If it had technical capabilities like Excel based data joining in dashboard or explorations without data module requiring creation upfront, would have been great for analysts.
- Report preparation - IBM Cognos Analytics reduced report formulation time by 60% specially for templated re-occurring reports like the monthly sales report
- Improved decision making - The decision making speed has improved with Cognos's self service dashboards and AI driven data exploration
- Automated distribution and uptime - Scheduled report delivery and bursting have eliminated various manual emailing and delays
Perfect reporting - Its great platform for creating professional, print ready reports with exact formatting and layout
Scheduling and report automation - It saves resource time by automating recurring reports and bursting them to different stakeholders with filters applied
AI driven insights - Its in-build AI feature helps uncover data patterns, and forecast, which is useful for quick data supported recommendation without heavy analysis
Scheduling and report automation - It saves resource time by automating recurring reports and bursting them to different stakeholders with filters applied
AI driven insights - Its in-build AI feature helps uncover data patterns, and forecast, which is useful for quick data supported recommendation without heavy analysis
Earlier we had to perform manual working on report formulation, ad-hoc analysis, dashboard building. With IBM Cognos Analytics, these things are automated along with AI enablement through natural language queries to get quick answers. Additionally, it helps in automatically scheduling and bursting personalising reports to different users and creating interactive dashboards against used historical static dashboards.
IBM Cognos Analytics is robust in terms of reporting, governance and scheduling while Power BI excels in use, interactivity and visuals. In nutshell, IBM Cognos Analytics has edge over Power BI for enterprise grade , structured reporting needs.
Do you think IBM Cognos Analytics delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with IBM Cognos Analytics's feature set?
Yes
Did IBM Cognos Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of IBM Cognos Analytics go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy IBM Cognos Analytics again?
Yes
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