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Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon QuickSight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
3rd
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.3%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Anoop Jose - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 1, 2024
Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature
We used it to analyze customer usage data within our application. We were consolidating data on user behavior and status, then presenting it to different audiences, such as executives and account managers. For building executive dashboards, especially when you don't require extensive drill-downs…
Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 27, 2022
Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon QuickSight is its connectivity with other Amazon services."
"The query and dashboard capabilities are entirely good."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility to visualize certain logs."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the low-level securities are very easy to use."
"It works well with the AWS ecosystem."
"Easily able to connect with our other services and easy to manage."
"It has a lot of valuable features, but the most important aspect is the affordable cost. This solution costs much less in comparison to the competitors like Qlik Sense, Power BI, and Tableau."
"I like that with Amazon QuickSight, you don't need to install an app to use its services. With other BI tools, you need to install the app, so Amazon QuickSight is better for me in this area."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
 

Cons

"The solution must be more user-friendly."
"It is a simple tool with limited features. Its visualization set is very limited, and it also has limited functionality. An intelligence tool should not be only for creating reports. Currently, we have to do all computational and mathematical operations outside. We should be able to do such operations in an intelligence tool like this. As an intelligence tool, it should support dynamic refresh. QuickSight currently supports the refresh at a minimum of one hour, and it is not suitable for dynamic dashboards that require frequent refreshes."
"The cost of queries is very high."
"The number of features in the product is limited in comparison with the other tools in the market, like Power BI."
"It's not ideal for reports that are more complex."
"I just want a few more features to be added."
"There could be an end-to-end pipeline for data cleaning as well as presenting it using different visualizations."
"The product has some storage and SPICE data issues."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the price of Amazon QuickSight a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"The solution is not affordable."
"I'm using a paid version of Amazon QuickSight, paying about $22 monthly. As I have yet to learn about the pricing for other tools, such as Power BI, I won't be able to compare."
"The product pricing is better than other vendors."
"The solution's pricing is cheaper than the other products in the market."
"A highly affordable cost structure with fixed membership and timeframe basis options."
"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."
"The pricing is cost-effective with a good plan."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"Pricing should be improved."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"It is averagely priced."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
57%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
Competition pricing is high for query processing, however, the Data Lake cost is nominal as it is on top of S3.
What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?
The cost of queries is very high. Improvements in drill-down ability and evolving it as an OLAP tool would help more.
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?
I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great f...
 

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: October 2024.
815,690 professionals have used our research since 2012.