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Adaptive Insights vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Adaptive Insights
Ranking in Reporting
25th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (10th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (5th), Data Visualization (20th), ESG Reporting Software (14th)
IBM Cognos
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 1.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.0%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos3.0%
Adaptive Insights1.8%
Other95.2%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight
Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models
For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.
RL
Senior Project Manager at BD
Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can 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 tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."
"It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday."
"The system has allowed us to take more than 90 spreadsheets and combine them into one system which automatically calculates based on assumptions, dimensions, etc."
"The reporting tools are what I gain the most benefit from."
"Adaptive saves us huge hours in budgeting, for each roll-up it saves us two hours at least, and we usually have more than 20 roll-ups."
"It has helped us to automate a lot of our processes."
"It helps develop a more unified work format throughout the company."
"Our organization is able to use Adaptive to complete a major majority of our monthly management and quarterly Board reports, and by refreshing reports and pages automatically, it creates the monthly report package with little to no manual staff work."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"We were able to save in excess of $650k per year using reports created through Cognos BI."
"IBM Cognos is a good tool for viewing reports, allows us to use the tool in an interactive and easy way, with the option to display it on various mobile devices."
"Good reporting features: TM1 (for planning, plans vs actuals analysis, what-if analysis) and SPSS (for predictive analysis and other type of analytics)."
"Cognos gives a consistent single source answer for many users to retrieve easily."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to quickly build cubes with Cognos Transformer."
 

Cons

"Needing to focus on upgrades for all industries, including CPG."
"Pricing can be made better affordable to SMEs. Every year price increase is an issue."
"The planning functionalities are the weakest part of Adaptive Insights."
"It's complex; thinking about the business models and capabilities in Adaptive."
"It's a Workday product; they could do a little bit better to integrate a pure-play integration with Workday, which really doesn't do that."
"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."
"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."
"We do have issues getting information on our customer success turnover."
"In IBM Cognos it always takes too long to build enterprise reporting."
"The tool is complex, and I would not recommend it to small companies, because you need to have expertise for Framework Model development, access rights issues, licensing, etc."
"Pricing model is frequently changing and hard to manage."
"Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses."
"Customer Service: It's poor. Technical Support: It's fair."
"The solution's support could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."
"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"It's affordable."
"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."
"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"Pricing should be improved."
"It is averagely priced."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"It is pretty expensive."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
report
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Regarding improvements for IBM Cognos, I think nothing yet about functionality, but I find the costs to be quite high for the enterprise system. However, since we need it, we continue to renew our ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos at my place of work is primarily for business intelligence (BI), mostly for serving, and we appreciate it because it covers the full BI stack, including dashboards, ...
 

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday
More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Find out what your peers are saying about Adaptive Insights vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.