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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Analytics Cloud comparison

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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
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (6th)
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.4%, down from 2.0% 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 Cloud1.4%
Other97.3%
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

"FM – though it lacks some of the previous version's features: dimensional and sorting."
"This product has made enhancements in building dashboards, incorporated changes to make it easier for the business users to import and use their metadata to do analysis."
"Customized reports are valuable because you can probably create any report you could imagine with it."
"I have not encountered any stability issues."
"Graphical interface is good"
"This is the only tool I know of that keeps both business and IT teams happy."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Technical support is very good."
"It's great for consolidation and creating one source of truth."
"It's really an enterprise solution. It has a dashboard, like standard dashboarding functionality. It also has reporting capabilities for producing pixel-perfect reports, bursting large volumes of a document if you need to. It has interactive data discovery functionality, which you would use to explore your data, bring your own data, and merge it with maybe the data from an enterprise data warehouse to get new insights from the pre-existing data. It has machine learning embedded in the solution. If you're new to machine learning, it's a really good way to get into it, because it's all within this platform, and it's really easy to use."
"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."
"Technical support is very fast and accurate."
"The advanced calculations by the tool are highly effective"
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"It has the best feature for data augmentation."
"The scalability is acknowledged as pretty good, although my evaluation is limited because I used the tool for a short period."
 

Cons

"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"The stability of the lookups is not very good, and really needs improvement."
"Metadata documentation could be improved. While IBM Cognos tools allow you to document most aspects of the metadata layer, the way this information is stored and exposed for metadata management is too basic."
"There is need for a faster resolution and expected time frame to resolve production issues. Whilst working on site and when support is needed for emergency issues, a quicker response time is required."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"As this version is evolving rapidly, finding in-depth training material can be challenging."
"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."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"We did not have a positive experience with technical support."
"Sharing dataflows is not possible at this time, and the custom chart functionality is not available."
"At this time, dataflows cannot be shared, but I think that this should be enhanced."
"One area of improvement is associated with more connectors needing to be added such as Microsoft OneDrive, Teradata and a few others. I think the list is limited to the top ones now."
"The solution could be more flexible."
"They could improve the ease of developing the dashboard and interacting with it."
"Its FAW feature has limitations in terms of usage."
"This product does not support custom charts in the visualization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"It is pretty expensive."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"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."
"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."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's pricing is generally higher than that of other vendors."
"Bottom line, the cost is really, really cheap compared to other solutions. Oracle has made a huge effort on the pricing."
"It is an expensive platform."
"The tool's pricing is not unreasonable or non-competitive."
"We pay on a monthly basis and it is $10 per user each month."
"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."
"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
13%
Insurance Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Construction Company
8%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
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 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, ...
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 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...
What needs improvement with Oracle Analytics Cloud?
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...
 

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: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.