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Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Amazon QuickSight offers cost-effective analytics with savings and efficiency, featuring security and affordability over Tableau for organizations.
Sentiment score
6.4
Organizations benefit from IBM Cognos by saving costs, reducing delivery times, enhancing productivity, and improving data insights and decision-making.
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
Senior Project Manager at BD
I have seen a return on investment, as I mentioned earlier about time saving and productivity gains, with a consistent governed data model that reduces the risk of errors.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.7
Amazon QuickSight's customer service receives mixed reviews, with ratings varying based on user experience and type of support arrangement.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Cognos support varies; online resources and knowledgeable staff assist, but complex issues lead to frustration with resolution times.
I would say out of all the support experience I've had, only 5% took quite a long time to respond to the support message.
Engineer at Hubtel
I would say at the moment, so far, good in the sense of Amazon's technical support.
General Manager Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
Senior Project Manager at BD
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.8
Amazon QuickSight is scalable and adaptable, though performance may decrease with extremely large datasets and high user counts.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Cognos is praised for its scalability, though it requires correct hardware and configuration to optimize performance fully.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is very good, as it has continued growing with my organization's needs, allowing us to analyze and store a significant amount of data and handle our organization's growth efficiently.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
Amazon QuickSight offers reliable stability, positive performance reviews, and effective data reconciliation despite some minor technical issues.
Sentiment score
7.2
IBM Cognos is reliable with correct setup, but complex tasks and high loads may cause occasional performance slowdowns.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon QuickSight struggles with feature limitations, integration issues, high costs, and lacks user-friendliness compared to competitors.
IBM Cognos needs better data visualization, user interface, and integration improvements to compete effectively with Tableau and Power BI.
Understanding how AWS charges for Amazon QuickSight usage is critical for all users wanting to visualize their data effectively.
IT Infrastructure Support Specialist at Olam Agri
For example, making automation for filling missing data or reformatting incorrect data formats, and making date corrections.
Freelancer at a government with 501-1,000 employees
On the analytics side, we are migrating into Amazon QuickSight. One of the products is already migrating, and the rest is in the pipeline.
General Manager Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Integration with Azure login makes trouble.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon QuickSight provides cost-effective, flexible pricing, ideal for AWS users, with pay-as-you-go and integration benefits but room for cost cuts.
IBM Cognos offers comprehensive features with competitive pricing, making it cost-effective for enterprises despite perceived high costs.
It is not expensive, but it is also not cheap.
Senior Solutions Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Valuable Features

Amazon QuickSight provides user-friendly, cloud-native data visualization with AWS integration, supporting diverse data sources and machine learning features efficiently.
IBM Cognos excels in reporting, integration, security, and analytics, providing essential tools for data-driven enterprise decision-making.
The interactive dashboards of Amazon QuickSight are very important tools in business intelligence.
Freelancer at a government with 501-1,000 employees
The natural language query is very important, and natural language processing is crucial for disseminating dashboards across multiple formats and mechanisms.
Senior Solutions Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Interactive dashboards do help with data analysis.
General Manager Information Systems at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I love the seamless and efficient data integration capability of IBM Cognos Analytics, where it allows us easy merging of data from various sources such as customer feedback and sales figures.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
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.
Senior Project Manager at BD
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon QuickSight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
4th
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 3.7%, down from 7.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon QuickSight3.7%
IBM Cognos1.3%
Other95.0%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SN
IT Infrastructure Support Specialist at Olam Agri
Can always access reports through intuitive dashboards that support diverse data connections
I can't specifically say how Amazon QuickSight could be improved since I focus more on using it and leveraging its functionalities. However, I could invest additional time to explore possible feedback from customers regarding their challenges. As cloud engineers, our capacity to improve is limited since AWS manages the services, but I would be open to feedback. I'm aware there are minor details that AWS could enhance, such as optimizing costs for beginners or small startups, which can be steep when trying to take Amazon QuickSight into production. Many have noticed that AWS services greatly benefit well-established companies, while startups struggle with costs as they transition data out of AWS. Understanding how AWS charges for Amazon QuickSight usage is critical for all users wanting to visualize their data effectively.
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.
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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
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise89
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?
The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?
Amazon QuickSight charges $250 per user, which becomes expensive when managing multiple departments. However, this cost is offset by the advantages it provides.
What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?
I don't want to hypothetically say about the effectiveness of Amazon QuickSight in terms of machine learning, so I need to pass on that. At the moment, on the cloud perspective, we have Amazon majo...
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 do you like most about IBM Cognos?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve. The more I use this platform, the more ...
 

Also Known As

QuickSight
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com
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 Amazon QuickSight vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,160 professionals have used our research since 2012.