IBM Cognos vs Oracle OBIEE comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Oracle OBIEE based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cognos vs. Oracle OBIEE Report (Updated: May 2023).
708,544 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us.""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 three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson.""In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager.""The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly.""IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets.""If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense.""The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."

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"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ease of use.""There are some great new features in the latest version.""I like the scheduling feature. It has an inbuilt scheduler which is very good, and it allows us to create agents, and those agents can be scheduled. It's quite flexible in that respect and goes into our IT infrastructure. The outputs are sent encrypted to various endpoints. Some are internal, and some are our clients, and it's encrypted at a high level. I do find Oracle OBIEE flexible. If there is stuff that's not in your model or schema, it's very flexible to create SQL scripts and create the data you want. It's quite nice to create a dashboard in OBIEE, and that's pretty straightforward in the way you drag and drop everything. You can create sections, and you can add elements to your page. That bit of the interface is relatively straightforward.""The most valuable features of Oracle OBIEE are ease of use, the graphical user interface is simple to understand, and the reports can be done without problems. There are many tutorials and training materials available if needed.""The main features of this solution are that it is easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. When I retrieve the data from the database it is in a very raw form, then when I use the Oracle Report Builder it has advanced intelligence features to allow me to view and make changes to the data easily.""The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the security of the solution.""The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities.""Oracle OBIEE is very easy to use. Looking at analytics, I think they have come a long way by adding new features like visualization, which is really cool."

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Cons
"The solution's support could be better.""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.""It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting.""There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data.""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.""I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information.""I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos.""Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."

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"The drawback with the tool is that though it is well-created, its users are under-trained to use it.""For a beginner, this is a product that is difficult to learn. You cannot learn it quickly.""There could be better integration with other solutions, such as Microsoft Office.""Warehouse and business intelligence are two different things, but OBIEE also has some warehouse features in it. I would like to see some of those capabilities improved.""An area for improvement is that Oracle pushes more users to Oracle BI Publisher rather than emphasizing Oracle OBIEE for reporting. The pricing for Oracle OBIEE could be improved.""In our organization, we feel that data visualization for APIs is an area in which the solution lacks.""Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier.""There are a lot of aspects of Oracle OBIEE that are exceptionally complicated, make things unnecessarily difficult for everyone who uses it. In terms of the integrations, Oracle needs to improve a little more, but I believe that they have tried to capture all those issues. The issues we are facing in the Oracle OBIEE 12C versions, in the Oracle Analytical Server Center or Analytical Cloud versions, Oracle has managed to overcome the challenges."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
  • "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."
  • "It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "It is pretty expensive."
  • "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."
  • "There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
  • More IBM Cognos Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It's comparable to the current technology we're using, Qlik Sense."
  • "Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs."
  • "Pricing is an area that could be improved."
  • "This is a very costly product."
  • "Its licensing is yearly."
  • "If you compare Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE licensing, then Oracle products are much better. With Qlik Sense, you have to pay per client and per use. But we get Oracle OBIEE along with the Oracle database, making it much more cost-effective in the long term."
  • "The licensing cost is based on the number of users using it."
  • "Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing."
  • More Oracle OBIEE Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The solution's support needs improvement. Also, they should add better administrative tools.
    Top Answer:Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle… more »
    Top Answer: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. OBIEE… more »
    Top Answer:It is easy to use...I rate the scalability of the solution a nine out of ten.
    Ranking
    Views
    15,790
    Comparisons
    10,523
    Reviews
    17
    Average Words per Review
    532
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    18,000
    Comparisons
    9,873
    Reviews
    33
    Average Words per Review
    473
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
    OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
    Learn More
    Overview

    IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

    IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

    IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

    • IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.

    • IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.

    • IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.

    • IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.

    • IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.

    • IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

    Reviews from Real Users

    IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

    Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

    Oracle OBIEE (Oracle Business Information Enterprise Edition) is a business intelligence (BI) tool developed by Oracle. OBIEE will gather, store and analyze an organization's network data and compile the information to create reports, dashboard graphs, and performance analysis. OBIEE’s unique platform allows clients to discover new awareness and improve the speed of completing important business decisions by providing robust visual tools and intuitive realization coupled with the latest unmatched enterprise analytics available. OBIEE helps IT enterprise organizations to experience an intelligent view of all enterprise data from across all sources and empowers trusted users with increased levels of reliable, dependable access, interaction, and the ability to utilize the data to increase the overall effectiveness and productivity of the organization.

    OBIEE provides unique immediate mobile access, intuitive dashboards, robust reporting, real-time alerts, metadata search, procedure management, direct access to Big Data resources, enlightened in-memory computing, and seamless systems management processes. These features seamlessly combine to make Oracle OBIEE a complete, top-of-the-line broad solution that is cost-effective, minimizes TCO, and provides a competitive, quick ROI for the entire organization.

    Oracle OBIEE Top Features 

    • Complete comprehension: Oracle OBIEE offers a full range of BI strategies, including intuitive smart dashboards, dynamic alerts and detection, efficient workflows, enterprise reporting, MS Office integration, real-time predictive analysis, and more. OBIEE also includes many next-generation options, including mission critical scalability and performance, diverse data access and integration, and a modern, robust, service-oriented architecture.
    • Hot-pluggable: OBIEE will take advantage of existing IT relationships, both Oracle and non-Oracle databases, solutions, and applications. Organizations that partner with OBIEE have access to an entire library of analytic tools that are immediately deployable and provide an improved TCO and a super-fast ROI. Additionally, in an outstanding collaboration with Hyperion, OBIEE incorporates BI tools that integrate well with the current suite to supply the grandest selection of BI tools available on the market today.
    • Extensive: OBIEE is very user-friendly and extremely intuitive, and the 100% Web UI brings robust and dynamic BI from diverse sources to any audience, distributing awareness when and where users require it to manage activities, decisions, and processes. 

    Reviews from Real Users

    Sandeep V., Process System Engineer at a comms service provider, tells us, “This solution is very easy for people who are building ad-hoc things. It's an enterprise solution so it can be deployed for a lot of users. There are some great new features that come with the 12c like data visualization, desktop BI Publisher, automation, and interactive dashboards. The product has good features. “ 

    A user who is a CEO at a consultancy relates, “The most valuable feature is the visualization. The data warehousing, data storage, and data wrangling are all features that are in there, and it's one of the better products out there. A good thing is that for large datasets, it's very stable, especially when you have an Oracle database.”

    A user who is a Principal Business Intelligence Architect at a computer software company suggests, "It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market."



    Offer
    Learn more about IBM Cognos
    Learn more about Oracle OBIEE
    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.
    Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Insurance Company9%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization36%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Government6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government8%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Government12%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise61%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise59%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise72%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Cognos vs. Oracle OBIEE
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Oracle OBIEE and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
    708,544 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    IBM Cognos is ranked 5th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 18 reviews while Oracle OBIEE is ranked 4th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 33 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.2, while Oracle OBIEE is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Helpful online community, highly reliable, and secure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle OBIEE writes "Rock solid, handles massive amounts of data quickly, and has a user-friendly interface for self-service BI". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft BI, Tableau, Oracle Hyperion, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, whereas Oracle OBIEE is most compared with Microsoft BI, Oracle Analytics Cloud, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. See our IBM Cognos vs. Oracle OBIEE report.

    See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors, best Reporting Tools vendors, and best Legacy BI Tools vendors.

    We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.