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IBM Cognos vs ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus 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

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)
ManageEngine Exchange Repor...
Ranking in Reporting
34th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.0%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos3.0%
ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus0.8%
Other96.2%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer2017023 - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Compliance Administrator at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees
Efficiently keeps track of how many mailboxes are created, how many are deleted, and things like that
We can keep track of how many mailboxes are created, how many are deleted, and things like that. It's a necessity for auditing to use a tool to monitor email tracking. So, it helps a lot with compliance. We can use the dashboard to see which Exchange servers are currently having issues, their health, and other details. The GUI is very good.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The product has a wide range of data presentation options."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"We use it for financial purposes, and simple reporting."
"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."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Excellent new functionality."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"We can use the dashboard to see which Exchange servers are currently having issues, their health, and other details. The GUI is very good."
"The email traffic analysis feature is very useful."
 

Cons

"The dashboard interface needs tremendous improvement as it's not very fast as compared to Tableau and the likes."
"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 flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"The cost of the license is very expensive and it's costly to achieve scalability."
"Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved."
"It is very expensive… You have to determine if the complexity of software you are getting is worth the price you are paying; how many bells and whistles do you need for what price."
"Every product on the market can be improved, but I would like IBM to stop trying to compete with the smaller players in the market, rushing out versions that nobody wants to migrate to because the version seems unstable."
"We are finding ‘undocumented features’ on a daily basis and reporting issues to IBM."
"I would like to see improvements in mobile reporting. When it comes to mobile/offline based reporting, Cognos is not really capable of handling medium to heavy data volume."
"I am primarily interested in reporting and automation improvements."
"There is room for improvement in the reporting, maybe having more customizable reports would be good."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"It is pretty expensive."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"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."
"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."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"The pricing of Exchange Reporter Plus is very reasonable."
"I would rate the pricing a four out of ten, where one is low price and ten is high price. It is affordable."
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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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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, ...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
Sunbelt Rentals, Inc, Life Management Center, IBTS 
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. ManageEngine Exchange Reporter Plus and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.