We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Oracle Essbase based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle, SAP, IBM and others in Legacy BI Tools."Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The solution is scalable."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"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."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
IBM Cognos is ranked 3rd in Legacy BI Tools with 129 reviews while Oracle Essbase is ranked 10th in Database Development and Management with 10 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Oracle Essbase is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle Essbase writes "It is easy to use and receives patch updates on regular intervals ". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Oracle Essbase is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud and Databricks.
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