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CA Deliver 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

CA Deliver
Ranking in Reporting
45th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Cognos
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of CA Deliver is 0.0%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 4.5%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

it_user346092 - PeerSpot reviewer
It's in essence a digital bank that keep customer information for 40 to 50 years, accessible 24/7.
It’s an archiving solution with all the support of CA. All your customer data flows through it, from their names to all their other details The benefits are that it keeps their information for over 40 to 50 years, so in essence it's a digital bank for customer information. This means that the…
AMOL JAJU - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ad hoc analysis reports and good for operational dashboarding
There used to be many valuable features, but in the last three or four years, whatever IBM is doing with enhancements, it has taken a lot of time to build and develop. But the best usage of Cognos is the ad hoc analysis reports. I really like that. Our customers also like that. But now the usage of Cognos and OBIE is reduced by various business users because people and business users are now more focused on analytics, slice and dice, and the dashboard, and the widgets.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having one repository for various output formats and retention periods. Provides the flexibility to establish hundreds of different retention entries, based upon business need, and then group the like retention period outputs together on the same media. It is very efficient."
"Flexibility of report configuration; allows for quick and simple amendments to definitions."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"It is a stable product."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
 

Cons

"A common theme with all CA products is they state compatibility with new technologies when it has not yet been proven. I cite the example that CA mainframe products were deemed to be compatible with Extended Address Volumes (EAV) - larger sized disk volumes - when they were not."
"Needs ability to allow export to xls/pdf, etc. (Note: this is available in add-on product CA – OM Web Viewer)."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"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."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​Pricing is reasonable, licensing model suitable for large enterprises."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"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 is averagely priced."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"The solution is affordable."
"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 quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"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
No data available
Educational Organization
53%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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 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?
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
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 CA Deliver vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.