IBM Cognos and Birst compete in business intelligence and analytics. While both offer comprehensive analytics solutions, Birst's focus on data discovery and visualization gives it an edge.
Features: IBM Cognos offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowing detailed insights, integration with various data sources, and centralized data management. Birst provides advanced data visualization, seamless data connectivity, and smart data aggregation.
Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos could enhance its user interface for a more intuitive experience. Simplifying the setup process for non-technical users and improving real-time data updates could be beneficial. Birst could improve in offering more robust customer support, providing more detailed documentation, and enhancing customization options for reports.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos provides a structured deployment model with reliable customer service, ensuring smooth implementation. Birst offers a cloud-first approach for faster deployment and flexibility, making integration easier with quick adaptability.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos involves substantial setup costs, but yields high ROI through detailed analytics. Birst's competitive pricing and faster ROI, due to efficient data management, appeal to businesses seeking quick analytics benefits.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
Birst Networked BI and Analytics eliminates information silos. Decentralized users can augment the enterprise data model virtually, as opposed to physically, without compromising data governance.
A unified semantic layer maintains common definitions and key metrics.
Birst’s two-tier architecture aligns back-end sources with line-of-business or local data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source into a unified semantic layer. Users are enabled with self-service analytics through executive dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.
Birst goes to market in two primary ways: as a direct sale, for enterprises using Birst on internal data to manage their business; and embedded, for companies who offer analytic products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products.
Birst’s is packaged in 3 available formats: Platform and per-user fee; by Department or Business Unit; by end-customer (for embedded scenarios).
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.
IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.
IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.
Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting 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.”
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