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Anaplan vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
4.8
Anaplan users save on costs, improve efficiency, and see increased sales and ROI, especially within the first year.
Sentiment score
6.9
IBM Cognos enhances decision-making and efficiency, offering savings, improved collaboration, and data-driven insights with automation and tailored reports.
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
Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
This demonstrates that it requires a lesser number of people. You do not need a huge team for maintaining or working with IBM Cognos.
Sr cloud engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.2
Anaplan's customer service is responsive and helpful, though complex issues may take longer, and lacks a support portal.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Cognos support experiences are mixed, with praise for expertise but concerns over response times and documentation quality.
The technical support from Anaplan is amazing, with a dedicated team to assist in case of any issues.
Lead Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
We are getting the kind of support that we need from Anaplan.
Anaplan Solution Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees
In terms of technical support, I would rate Anaplan a two out of ten, as they are poor.
Director - Finance Systems at QualiTest Group
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
Customer support for IBM Cognos is very responsive.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Anaplan offers scalable solutions for large enterprises, enhancing connectivity and integration despite rising costs with larger implementations.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Cognos is praised for scalability, efficiently managing growth and balancing workloads, despite configuration and hardware challenges.
Anaplan had issues before, but the new Polaris engine solves them.
Lead Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
IBM Cognos displays good scalability, as it handles increased data growth well.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
It works across small teams to enterprise-level deployment.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
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
7.7
Anaplan is praised for stability, reliable performance, minimal maintenance, improved integration, and consistently high uptime ratings of nine out of ten.
Sentiment score
7.3
IBM Cognos is highly stable, with occasional minor issues, and users report excellent reliability with regular updates and maintenance.
Anaplan is performing very well with new features.
Director - Finance Systems at QualiTest Group
IBM Cognos is stable and very flexible.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
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

Users desire enhanced Anaplan features including better automation, visualization, customization, pricing, performance, and machine learning capabilities to boost adoption.
IBM Cognos needs improvements in visualization, interface, data connectivity, integration, stability, support, and mobile user experience to compete.
If any kind of history can be captured on the front-end UX page, that would be really appreciated and helpful.
Anaplan Solution Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Anaplan cannot perform some tasks handled by Planning Analytics due to their different foundations, Anaplan on Hyperblock technology and TM1 on OLAP.
IBM Planning Analytics SME and Developer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
One improvement that could be added to Anaplan is to stabilize the models when data complexity increases, allowing us to manage our time and space well.
Anaplan Model Builder at Xenlytics
I would also suggest enhanced predictive analytics to move from more reactive to proactive decision-making.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 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
IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
 

Setup Cost

Anaplan offers premium pricing from $30,000 annually, with costs based on user, storage, tier, and additional features.
IBM Cognos is costly but feature-rich; negotiate discounts or bundled licenses for better pricing.
Currently, Anaplan is more expensive compared to other tools.
Product Support Engineer at JSW
The pricing is slightly on the premium side, but I do not have detailed knowledge about the exact licensing structure.
Lead Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 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

Anaplan offers user-friendly, cloud-based, real-time planning and integration with strong automation, reporting, and scalability for diverse industries.
IBM Cognos excels in enterprise reporting, dashboard creation, and scalability, offering AI-driven insights and user-friendly features for data management.
Anaplan's connected planning feature is its most valuable aspect, allowing for seamless financial planning, HR planning, and updates.
Lead Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
The integration is very seamless compared to any other tools in the market, making Anaplan quite easy to integrate with different tools.
Anaplan Model Builder at Xenlytics
I like about Anaplan the simplicity and the way it makes reporting easier and planning is broken down well.
Associate Manager, Accounting at BIC
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
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
Our dedicated cybersecurity team ensures that sensitive data does not become public, making it crucial that data stored in IBM Cognos remains secure throughout the entire data cycle, which is where these enterprise-grade security measures prove invaluable.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Anaplan
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (1st), Production Planning (2nd), Predictive Analytics (3rd)
IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (10th), Reporting (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Anaplan is designed for Business Performance Management and holds a mindshare of 6.5%, down 14.4% compared to last year.
IBM Cognos, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.4% mindshare, down 3.3% since last year.
Business Performance Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Anaplan6.5%
Adaptive Insights4.9%
Board4.6%
Other84.0%
Business Performance Management
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Microsoft Power BI7.5%
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Other85.3%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Q&A Highlights

LS
project finance manager at DMS Group
Jan 10, 2025
 

Featured Reviews

Segun Oladele - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Manager, Accounting at BIC
Reporting and forecasting have become more automated through intuitive data organization and flexible number calendarization
I do not have any improvements from my own end at this time.There are some specific features or functionality that I would like to see included in Anaplan in the future. From what we have been using, I do not think there is any specific one because we import and export numbers. Importing and exporting with CSV files is already available in Anaplan. I do not have any special requests from Anaplan. I still decided to give Anaplan an eight because I have not seen a specific dashboard on Anaplan. Anaplan could have a dashboard where you can see the flow of your numbers displayed on pictorials rather than just saying this is the number. Simple dashboards should be implemented.
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.
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Performance Management solutions are best for your needs.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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…
 

Answers from the Community

LS
project finance manager at DMS Group
Jan 10, 2025
Jan 10, 2025
Hi Leonardo, I have had the benefit of working with IBM PA and Anaplan applications for many years. If you are working on a smaller application with only a few dimensions (Anaplan calls them lists), Anaplan is fine except for ongoing costs and maintenance. A few, small dimensions, maybe planning by device group (not lower SKU level), general sales locations, departments, time and a two to three...
See 2 answers
Milan Orendac - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Business Executive at Sophia
Jul 24, 2024
Both products are great and are massive planning and analyzing tools. I am not sure about the size and complexity of your business. You mention "small businesses". To use IBM Cognos or Anaplan for small business may give more headache than benefits. My suggestion would be to work out the expectations and needs for your planning process and to search for the right tool, fitting to your needs.
CM
Managing Partner at Alpha Performance Management, Inc
Jan 10, 2025
Hi Leonardo, I have had the benefit of working with IBM PA and Anaplan applications for many years. If you are working on a smaller application with only a few dimensions (Anaplan calls them lists), Anaplan is fine except for ongoing costs and maintenance. A few, small dimensions, maybe planning by device group (not lower SKU level), general sales locations, departments, time and a two to three versions, Anaplan works (again, watch ongoing & expansion costs). When it becomes more complex where you want to do more granular planning at the product SKU, multiple budget cycles and rolling forecast throughout the year, across territories, by internal rep, different channels, with distributors selling in multiple territories, that is where IBM Planning Analytics shines. You can plan/forecast at any level including consolidated and have room to expand when needed.  Expansion with Anaplan with granularity becomes very difficult, very quickly.  I am happy to show the differences. Ping me if you like, www.linkedin.com/in/chrismirras. We work very well with Global Clients.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Retailer
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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise18
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
 

Questions from the Community

What are your main use cases for Anaplan?
Anaplan is an industry-leading cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) platform that combines business planning and analytics in a single solution. It is designed to assist organizations...
Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?
We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...
Is Anaplan better than SAP ERP?
There are different aspects of both Anaplan and SAP ERP that I like and dislike. Anaplan improves forecast accuracy and drives up the quality of analytics. Rather than spending all of their time co...
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, ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HP, ForeScout, DocuSign, EAT, Pandora, Aviva, Intel Security, Zalora
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 Anaplan, SAP, Oracle and others in Business Performance Management. Updated: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.