IBM Cognos Reviews, Competitors and Pricing (2023)

BI Cognos Expert at Pilmark LTD

Most of my customers are on-premise, but I have two customers who are on the cloud.

IBM Cognos is used for reporting and I work with all businesses, but mainly in thebanking and insurance industry.

The most valuable feature ofIBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long afterIBM Cognos has had them.

IBM Cognos is a very big solution, and it is similar to other large solutions, such asSAP and Oracle, everything is in one solution and one platform. It's very easy to use from one to the other.

The new data module makes life much easier when youcombine it with very complex modules. You can build and combine things veryquickly if you need to.You can keep the main organizational data structure and then you can combine it with specific external usage. It's very practical at that level.

It is very important for large organizations to have a secure solution, and this solution is secure. I trust IBM a lot. Having the full web organization structure and organization local modules, you are about to do small operationsquickly.

There are somesmall features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and noteasy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos.

That would be nicer if you'd have more charts, the ability to add charts easily. That would be a big improvement. However, the maps have been improved immensely which I amhappy with.

The initial setup of IBM Cognosis complex.It takes time and experience to know how to do it. You can't only install it, there area lot of things you need to take into consideration before you begin. You have to make sure you have the right hardware specifications, and that you are not conflicting with any firewalls. You can put it on many servers and for largeorganizations. The solution can handlecomplex issues that other solutions can't. Most of thesmaller products can't handle it. IBM Cognosis efficient athandling multi servers with data coming from many places and organizing it into one place. The implementationcan take a long time because the requirements are complex.

The basic setup will take approximately oneday. If it is not a basic implementation the timedepends on how complex the data is and how much needs to be worked on. For example, on a predefined data warehouse, in which everything has been done, the setup might only bea few hours then you can start working.

It can be between hours and months. It depends on the context of how many databases are being used, fields, and calculations. You can bring 500 tables and none of them are difficult, but then you have one table with three calculations and takes three weeks to build because those calculations are complex. it doesn't matter which tool you use.

The amount of people needed to support the implementation dependson the customer. If it's a small business-sizedcustomer with10 to 20 users, I can do the implementationby myself. If it's a larger businessthen sometimes four, five people.

The maintenance can be veryminimal because the data structure doesn't change. However, on the other hand, some customers have the requirements over time to change.

IBM Cognos can provide a substantial return on investment but it dependson the implementation and use case. I've been in organizationswhere I improved delivery from 24 hours to an hour. They had hardware coming in and it took them a long time to process it. I brought in easy-to-use reporting systems, which they could check the inventory coming in and approve it in less than an hour using barcodes.

The barcode would send the information to the ERP system in a way that was easy for it to receive. However, the process was very slow. We added a few things, and the operation was doing better. If you use it properly, you can improve your business services immensely.

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Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

I have used IBM Cognos for 15 years as a business user, but for most of this time Ionly used the basic functionality of Cognos with Analysis Studio. However, two years ago we started using the new version of Cognos (11) and it was then that we began using more functionality overall. Notably, there are more features for reporting, so we can simply create modules and explore them with dashboarding.

Our deployment is situated on-premises, although we do use external databases connected to Excel, for instance. The packages that we use are all made inside the Cognos 11 environment.

IBM Cognos has helped improve the quality of our KPIs because we can now deliver data and reports without human intervention.

We are using the self-service capabilities for business users in the new version and it is a blessing to us because now we don't feel any pain with regards to the IT department. We can use the full functionality and develop dashboards without the help of the IT people and without having to start up a whole new project. This is very important because we can multiply the results. With no bottleneck coming from the IT department, we reduce the cost of improving our KPIs.

The main difference that Ilike about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way.

Tableau and Power BI also have similar features, where they try to use graphic functionality to analyze the data. And yes, there are more people using these solutions than Cognos, but for us the most important thing is that both the data and the data splitting functionality are in one place.

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality.

The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

As a business user, we try to do cross solutions to provide information for any department, and then we make it scalable. If the performance isn't good, we can either adjust the scalability of the data or the data strategy itself.

Currently, there are more than 2,000 users of Cognos in my organization, as it is mainly a cooperative tool for analysis. I think with the added capabilities and improved user experience of the new version we can extend the use of Cognos to even more people. We try to democratize the analysis of data with the dashboard as it is the easiest way to extend our usage of Cognos.

My advice to others is to make solutions with a bridge between them to optimize the use of the data. In addition, it's important to structure your data well to facilitate better understanding among your users. When users use a data module, for example, it must have well-structured folders which include the documentation, the calculations, the KPIs, etc. We train to make all the KPIs in the data module, because if you make the KPIs in the report or in the dashboard, then you can't use those KPIs in other objects. We have had other solutions from different consultants where they made the calculations with the reports, such that to make another report, you would have to repeat the calculation.

Another piece of advice is not to use the Analysis Studio's reporting tool, because it's very complex to maintain. Instead, we tend to use the dashboard, and that is what I would recommend to others as well.

On the whole, I would rate IBM Cognos an eight out of ten.

Last updated: Aug 19, 2022

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Director - Metrics & Analytics with 5,001-10,000 employees

The data uploads that we do, such asExcel files, have alot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would bea great help.

In the next release of the solution,It would be a great addition to the analytical tool pack if there werehistograms on the fly it would be a benefit. I know there is a workaround on IBM Cognos and I've used that workaround to develop the histograms, but not everyone is that tech-savvy. It would be a great help if we had some of these features, such ashistogram, box plots, on the fly.

Lastly, the solution could improve by addingsome of the user-friendly statistical calculations, such aspercentile calculations, median, mode, for calculations.

We had an issuewith thedashboards and wewere in touchwith the technical support from IBM to resolve the problem.

On the overall experience with the technical support, I would rate them a four out of five. However, theinitial response time could improve.

The analytical parts of IBM Cognos are some of the best in the market, it is excellent. I've used Qlik Sense, MicrosoftBI, Oracle Business Intelligence, and to some extent Tableau. The second feature that IBM Cognos is excellent with, is the table structure that we can create on the fly. I have had a very good experience with them.

Microsoft BI is much more user-friendly and non-technical personnel can also start working on the Microsoft BI quickly. It would be great if IBM Cognos would also look at doing something on that front, where a non-technical person can also develop some small, very basic dashboard on their own.

The initial setup was a bit complex.

The joins and structures that we had to create were somewhat difficult. I've worked on the OB as well and the RPD constructions that we do on OB are pretty straightforward. If we have some features such aswe have in Oracle Business Intelligence, of the RPD structure, it would be a great help for IBM Cognos.

Iwould rate the complexity a threeout of five.

We used support from the vendor for the implementation. It took approximately one and a halfmonths for the process.

For some of the aspects of the solution requires maintenance. One of the features that we were using is the development of interactive and interdependent dashboards. For some reason, this dashboard used to fail when we would get out of the dashboard and close IBM Cognos and come back to IBM Cognos again. That required an upgrade on the application, which we did, but it was still not working. This issue required some maintenance to resolve.

If the cost is not a problem for the organization, then I would highly recommend IBMCognos.

I rateIBM Cognos a seven out of ten.

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Sr. Data Warehouse Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Due to the way our product is designed, it has not been possible for us to use Cognos because of one of their issues. When we upgraded to Cognos 11, there was an issue with this version and we are not able to use the dynamic query mode. So essentially, we've not been able to use the dashboards and other kinds of reports in Cognos 11.

In terms of Cognos 11, we primarily upgraded due to the support for Cognos 7 going away. I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot. We haven't been able to use them recently. Most of the reports we've used are upgraded versions of legacy reports.

In terms of what could be improved with this product,the speed could be better.

The second thing I feel is lacking in Cognos 11 is usability -ease of use. I find Tableau much easier to use.

I havenot used stories and dashboards extensively, but I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which isvery important for all the clients.

The other thing that should be included in Cognos is Landing Pages. It would be good fortheDashboard Landing Page, if they could make it as easily and attractively as Tableau, that's the only other tool I've used, and theirs iscompletely visually appealing. The client should want to click and open the Cognos portal to get their data. We have our own product and Cognos is integrated with it. If they're able to get similar data, even if it isnot as detailed in our product, they don't have any motivation to go to Cognos. They need to polish their product a little bit to make it more user-friendly and customizable -that would help.

The setup isslightly complex for us because Cognos is basically integrated with our company's product.

So what happens is, we have our product and Cognos is a separateproduct,a reporting tool for that product. Whenever we release a new version of Cognos, we have to make a sort ofhandoff from our product to Cognos andwe need to create some Custom Namespaces and do other Custom Roles. So for us, the setup is complicated.

But I have installed Cognos out of the box once, as well, and it wasvery easy. I did face an issue in an early in version 11.0.1, that whenever Cognos started and set up everything, a lot of times RAM use wasan issue, even though the system had quite a lot ofRAM. But if the system RAM was allocated to the standby memory, then Cognos did not get it. That used to be an issue. However, that issue has been resolved in subsequent versions.

On a scale of one to ten, I wouldrate Cognos a7.

I do like the product. I think there is room for improvement. Cognos has started taking steps towards improvement likenew solutions such asTableau, however, there is still quite a way to go. Cognos's framework model requirement does restrict everything. If you want to make any changes to existing reports, it is a tedious process to add some new tables or change joints or things like that, to make it part of the data model. That's one of the main issues that we had. But other than that, I'm quite happy with the product.

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Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Architect

IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to theerror messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which requireda lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needingimprovement.

In order for IBM Cognos to survive, they need to keep up with dashboarding. I know they're becoming more agile as far as being able to move away from a framework manager and use modules, which is great in order to build the models. They need to be able to compete with Microsoft B because Microsoft BI has beaten them up as far as reporting and dashboarding. They need to improve to better compete with other solutions.

You could scale IBM Cognos to any size. I don't believe that the institution that I worked with or worked for had it implemented to the best of the application's ability. Therefore, it was undervalued as far as how it was utilized.

We have approximately 500 to 600 people in my organization using the solution.

IBM Cognos was used extensively for its purpose. It could have been used more. We did not need the additional application that was bought by the company.The task that these other applications were being bought for, could have been performed very well with IBM Cognos. However, the management lack of understanding of the application, and they didn't have the skill sets to work with the equipment nor did they have the willingness to work with it.

IBM Cognos technical support is verycumbersome. A large organization, such as IBMis very cumbersome when it comes to technical support because without having a dedicated support person for our company every time a ticket was called in, it was the same basic fundamental send me this file, send me that file. They didn't understand and we didn't have a dedicated source.

I rate the technical support from IBM Cognos a three out of five.

We have a team of two that did the maintenance and support of the solution.I did all of the maintenance and upkeep of the application and the upgrade and everything else.

Overall IBM Cognos is notmaintenance heavy. Once you set it up properly, it runs close tomaintenance-free.

Once you develop the skill set to operate the IBM Cognosapplication, it's a very robust system.

IBM Cognos has come a long way and they've done a lot of things with dashboarding, but it could be a little, too late, and not enough. They need to do better.

I rateIBM Cognos an eight out of ten.

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RPA Architect & RPA Product Owner at Francisco Sosa

It's quite easy to use.

The tool has a group of algorithms that allows you to find links rapidly.

It is also very easy to create link charts and analytics quickly.

This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats. We don't have any kind of issues with this product.

The online documentation is good, but it could be better. If the documentation could provide more examples, it would be nice.

It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

We are using the Cognos Analytics version.

It's a stable solution. It's very strong.

With Software AssessmentServices, you can forget about the infrastructure. The servers and everything that is related to the typical deployment of the tool is easy because it's on the IBM Cloud.

Your focus your attention on using it instead of the technical side of things.

It is too soon for me to say anything about the scalability, but my impression is that it doesn't matter the amount of data you need to analyze the tool. The background has the infrastructure and the features that allow you to grow according to what you need.

Currently, we have a couple of users but will have five or six more next month.

The technical support is fast.

You have access to a knowledge base where you can look for the issue. If you cannot find it, you can contact IBM support and you will get an answer very quickly.

We were working with Power BI on a local deployment, but unfortunately, itsuddenly presented some issues. We tried tore-install it but were notsuccessful. To this day, we still don't know why this happened.

We quickly changed toIBM Cognos and is quite good.

We were also working with Tableau. It's also a local installation. It's very good, very powerful, and has a lot of features you can use to analyze the data. Cognos is easier to use.

The initial setup was extremely easy.

You log in from your account or create an account and instantly you have access to a 30-day trial or you can test the tool, and create exercises to determine if it is good for you. Once complete you can decide if you want to pay monthly or you can dismiss the tool.

In our case, the only thing that we needed to do was to upload the data, which took a couple of hours.

We don't require any staff to maintain this solution.

I don't have this information, it is handled by our finance department.

It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive.

It's a good idea to take a course online to learn how it works before you start.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The product isa very goodreporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report.

We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis.

It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.

We implemented it on the web. Before that, there was a separate request that needed to be raised for a report to be issued.We needed to fetch items and it took time. Now, according to their requirement, users can schedule their own reports. They get a URL they can access.They have a GUI on the Netcool page and they can access the data using this Cognos report.

The solution is pretty easy to install. The documentation on offer is very good and it's very instructive.

The user interface is very nice.IBM Netcool interface is the same, and we can implement the same Netcool web GUI on a web page. Within the Netcool servers, we can integrate this tool to give users access to the environment.

The integration and configuration capabilities are very good.

The solution is very simple while also being quite robust and scalable.

As we get new requirements, we need to see if they fit into Cognos. As of right now, it fits our needs, however, that can change.

We've had issues in the past that the solution is still working to resolve.

The solution seems to slow down the servers. We're working with IBM to see if this can be resolved.

We are customers and partners.

Currently, we are also using AIOps and IBM Watson also, which is an artificial intelligence tool that is also very easy.

We trust IBM and its platforms. They've optimized for monitoring very well. Their support is also excellent.

Iwould rate the solution at a nine out of ten. So far, it's been a great solution for us. We're quite happy with its capabilities.

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CFO at a consumer goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees

When we started with the TM1 version of IBM Cognos, we developed budgeting projects, and it was successful. We also completed our first project five years ago using the solution.

IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets. We use it monthly for our tax numbers, and the solution automatically provides them.

The solution can be used for projects focused on employees' wages, contracts, contracted salaries, and additional outcomes.

With IBM Cognos Report Studio, we have a lot of operational information, which helps with sales, inventories, and costs from many different sources.

We have an analytical team, and they complete reports. We shuttle them, and many people in our company get information in Excel and email.

The TM1 feature is good because it produces numbers automatically. In addition, it has Super Excel, and there are big groups with a lot of information calculated quickly.

IBM Cognos is easy to use and helps connect with databases and the data from our systems. It is also easy to learn and teach new team members.

We started working with Power BI, which we feel will be number one in a couple of years. Even though it still has some improvement, it's a promising tool. All BI tools have similar issues to IBM Cognos.

Regarding additional features, it would be good if the solution had conditional formatting similar to Excel, where you can conditionally format based on colour. For example, colour scales like green, yellow, and red make it easier to categorize tables, rows or columns by colour. Unfortunately, this feature does not exist in any BI tool.

It is a scalable solution. We have about six people on our analytics team and two IT employees. The IT employees maintain a data warehouse and work with SQL where the data comes to Cognos.

We do not need to increase our usage because our analytics team reports and sends all the information to employees, managers, top management and others in the company.

Last updated: Jul 18, 2022

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