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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
33rd
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
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of CA Deliver is 0.9%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.0%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos3.0%
CA Deliver0.9%
Other96.1%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

it_user837525 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer (Sr. level II) at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Gives us one repository for various output formats and retention periods
A common theme with all CA products is they state compatibility with new technologies when it has not yet been proven. Much like other technology companies that have fallen into this trap, let feature and compatibly releases be controlled by the technical group, instead of the marketing and/or management people. 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. I have been doing this for 37 years and see it all too often, sometimes to the detriment of the company itself (Storage Technology Corp. and its Iceberg array comes to mind).
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.

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."
"Extremely stable and reliable, and easy to install."
"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."
"Flexibility of report configuration; allows for quick and simple amendments to definitions."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"IBM Cognos is a very comprehensive analytics tool that dissolves the challenge of turning complex and large data sets into clear, actionable insights by providing an intuitive platform for data visualization and reporting."
"IBM Cognos generates reports very fast and quickly."
"Go ahead, you will not regret."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"This product has improved the way our organization and our customers truly interact with information, really putting the capabilities into the hands of the key decision makers and not having to rely on IT resources that do not have the business knowledge to do this for them; true self-service analytics."
"Data modeling Back end delivery options End user device options Report designer Scalability"
 

Cons

"I work with the developers so I get what I want built into the project."
"Needs ability to allow export to xls/pdf, etc. (Note: this is available in add-on product CA – OM Web Viewer)."
"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."
"After spending a day working in the editor on a report, the UI gets slower and slower."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"Prompting should be better."
"There is room for improvement with the GUI. The product is a web-based application; it is easy to build basic style. However, at a certain level, it lacks support for advanced web programming capabilities, such as JavaScript, Ajax, etc."
"The biggest problem that I see with Cognos is not the product itself, but the support of the product."
"Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​Pricing is reasonable, licensing model suitable for large enterprises."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"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."
"The solution is affordable."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
 

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 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, ...
 

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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.