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IBM Cognos vs Mode Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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 BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
136
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (5th)
Mode Enterprise
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
29th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
4.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mode Enterprise is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Mode Enterprise0.9%
Other97.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2648136 - PeerSpot reviewer
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized reporting has supported university-wide regulatory dashboards and secure data access
From my experience, we use regular dashboarding with IBM Cognos for producing scheduled reports and for mandatory regulatory reporting. All our departments use IBM Cognos, with each department developing their own reports while our corporate IT team provides the data. Some people use the interactive dashboards feature of IBM Cognos, and there are also other tools in use. I think some users utilize Power BI and Tableau, but our IT organization only provides IBM Cognos as an enterprise business intelligence and reporting tool. IBM Cognos is evaluated and complies fully with all our security standards. In my opinion, IBM Cognos is very stable. It has been around for many years and many users are familiar with it, ensuring it performs well in its intended capacity. The benefits of choosing IBM Cognos, aside from cost savings, include having institutional knowledge for maintaining this infrastructure and a reliable solution that enhances developer productivity, given our team's extensive experience with IBM Cognos.
Shivkumar Targude - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Custom cohort dashboards have transformed customer tracking but still need richer built‑in visuals
From my perspective, adding more custom visualizations as inbuilt features would be greatly beneficial for developers and other teams. For specific visualizations, we currently need to use Python and JavaScript combinations to create great visualizations such as cohort analysis. If these visualizations were added by default to Mode Enterprise, it would be beneficial for all of us. There are common visualizations that are not currently in Mode Enterprise but should be added. There are advantages and disadvantages to the current state. The advantages mainly include the ability to combine all datasets, which definitely reduces time. Because Python and JavaScript are supported, we can develop cohort dashboards, which many other BI tools do not support. Mode Enterprise supports cohort dashboards, which is a significant advantage.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"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."
"The solution is simple for people from a viewing perspective, not a coding perspective."
"The most important feature of the solution is the ability to run Python-based scripts."
"The most valuable feature I would say is the flexibility in editing."
"Mode Enterprise positively impacted my organization with its clean visualization and slightly faster response times."
"The tool helps to catch results and review them."
"I have used many other BI tools, but when I compare other BI tools with Mode Enterprise, I find it more interesting because it supports Amazon Redshift and cloud-related technology as well as some static-related technology, and it also supports customization through coding with JavaScript and Python."
 

Cons

"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"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."
"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 high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"The solution could run faster."
"The data visualization is cumbersome in Mode Analytics. I want the solution to add a map that has an easy interface. The UI is slow sometimes."
"I think in terms of User Interface, I would say it can be better."
"From my perspective, adding more custom visualizations as inbuilt features would be greatly beneficial for developers and other teams."
"Mode Analytics needs to improve the overall user experience."
"Mode Enterprise can be improved by reducing the cost, as I think the enterprise version is much costlier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"It is averagely priced."
"It is pretty expensive."
"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."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"The pricing is per user."
"Mode Analytics is cheap compared to other tools."
"My decision-maker found the pricing expensive, but it is okay for me."
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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
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Media Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise86
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 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?
Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve. The more I use this platform, the more ...
What needs improvement with Mode Analytics?
From my perspective, adding more custom visualizations as inbuilt features would be greatly beneficial for developers and other teams. For specific visualizations, we currently need to use Python a...
What is your primary use case for Mode Analytics?
Mode Enterprise is being used for dashboard purposes only, specifically for custom dashboards. For the e-commerce domain, we use Mode Enterprise to track customers, such as finding out a customer's...
What advice do you have for others considering Mode Analytics?
Regarding licensing, I cannot provide detailed information on that topic. However, I can say that Power BI is open-source. If Mode Enterprise were provided as open-source, more people could start u...
 

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.
Lyft, Zenefits, Twitch, Trello, Clover, Grovo, CrowdFlower, Segment, Everlane, Pocket, Highfive
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Mode Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
880,954 professionals have used our research since 2012.