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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Analytics Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 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
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (3rd)
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.2%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Oracle Analytics Cloud1.2%
Other97.5%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
DavidMalizia - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Data And Ai at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Data projects have grown rapidly and support complex analytics and quick dashboard delivery
Some things that could be improved in Oracle Analytics Cloud is definitely the way it works. In some cases, for example, if you want to create analytic functions such as the percentage of a measure over another, which is a straightforward question you might ask, it appears simple to do, but the result is not what you expect. I would make it more user-friendly in terms of creating new measures. The measure creation feature could be improved. In terms of functionality, there are not many functions that are completely missing. There is one aspect that if you compare it with Power BI from Microsoft, which works completely in memory and therefore puts everything in memory to allow many calculations on the fly on what is in memory, that is missing, but it is architecturally different and would not be possible to ask for something like that. Some time features and time series analysis functions could be improved. Calculating a year ago and previous period functions could definitely work with some improvement.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"IBM support, a suite of tools covering a broad set of analytic capabilities, and the ability to integrate with a multitude of platforms make it a powerful solution."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The product is very scalable and can support thousands of end users, and huge companies are using this product."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"We are able to rapidly communicate financial reporting and statements for reconciliation purposes."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The stability of the product itself by virtue of the fact that it's a cloud product and Oracle is responsible for its hosting is valuable."
"Depending on the needs of business to business, but as far a visualizations are concerned, this is a good product."
"Using this tool, we were able to forget about using Excel and keep using it as the only source of data."
"The advanced calculations by the tool are highly effective"
"The most valuable features of the solution are dashboarding and data visualization."
"It's great for consolidation and creating one source of truth."
"The product is easily customized."
"Its scalability is really what makes it stand out; you can on the fly increase the processing capacity of your instance for as long as you need it and then bring it back to whatever minimum setting you had, all with no downtime, which is very impressive."
 

Cons

"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"I would give technical support a rating of 4/10. IBM technical support should be improved and their turn-around time should be reduced."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"I've encountered issues where calculation runs took upwards of six hours because of data storage and build issues."
"The Cognos Analysis Studio and Cognos Query Studio user interface has room for improvement in the area of user experience."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The charts and graphics are very weak."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"They could improve the ease of developing the dashboard and interacting with it."
"The product should be improved in terms of connectors; right now the top twenty connectors are available, but OneDrive and Teradata are missing."
"This solution could be more adaptable in its application."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"The solution could be more flexible."
"The price of the solution could be lower."
"Enterprise customers shy away from purchasing Oracle Analytics Cloud and prefer competing solutions from Tableau and Microsoft."
"The interfaces could be improved and some in-memory operations could be built into Oracle Analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's pricing is generally higher than that of other vendors."
"We pay on a monthly basis and it is $10 per user each month."
"It is an expensive platform."
"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the value received for the price charge."
"The product’s pricing is expensive. However, feature-wise, it fits the requirements of enterprise customers."
"Bottom line, the cost is really, really cheap compared to other solutions. Oracle has made a huge effort on the pricing."
"A highly cost-effective solution"
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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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise11
 

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?
One area where IBM Cognos can be improved is that customer service sometimes is not very responsive, and I would love to see the user interface improved, especially to look somehow updated. In addi...
Which Oracle product is better - OBIEE or Analytics Cloud?
Oracle OBIEE is designed to be relatively easy to set up and has a helpful customer support staff at the ready to assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What do you like most about Oracle Analytics Cloud?
The ability to quickly search for and access relevant data is crucial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Analytics Cloud?
Pricing for Oracle Analytics Cloud works with how much you want it to cost. We have clients who have bought large amounts of Oracle and the price per product has gone down massively because they bo...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Oracle Analytics Cloud Service, OAC, Oracle Data Visualization, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service, ODV
 

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.
Sejong Hospital
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Oracle Analytics Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.