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IBM Cognos vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

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Buyer's Guide
IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
May 2023
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 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. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Report (Updated: May 2023).
Download the complete report
708,544 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
KARTHIKEYAN THANGARASU
A strong reporting tool with good dashboard functionality, but lacking a configurable UI
This solution has provided us with a single control tool, which allows us to easily provide reports for the different sections of our banking... Read more →
Anonymous User
User friendly report creation but not great on the dashboarding side
It was a tool that was established in its current form a very long time back, so most of the uses are familiar. The familiarity is very good with... Read more →
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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.""Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules.""Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions.""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.""The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson.""The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us.""The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting.""It is a stable product."

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"One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it.""The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features.""The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use.""The planning and dashboarding features have been useful. Additionally, the fixed-format reports are good.""We find the product to be very stable.""The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great.""The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries.""The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all dashboards with self-service BI and are able to provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →

Cons
"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.""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.""Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic.""Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes.""I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers.""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.""Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos.""There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."

More IBM Cognos Cons →

"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using.""Technical support may not always be timely or effective.""It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did.""We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud.""We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products.""I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market.""It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud.""The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →

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 →

  • "We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webby that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay."
  • "The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
  • "SAP is losing market to its competitors because of its costly user license and licensing model. They can do much better on the licensing side. That's what Microsoft has been doing, and that's why Power BI is gaining market share at the moment. SAP needs to relax a little bit on the licensing part. If Microsoft is giving people a solution that is half of the cost of SAP, people will definitely go with Power BI."
  • "SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
  • "We are satisfied with the solution, but we are not satisfied with the licensing cost which SAP offers. They offer one lumpsum licensing which does everything. That is not the right strategy, because sometimes you don't have power users, they are only viewers, but we need to buy the full license for them. This is not something we want to continue with."
  • "There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
  • "It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
  • "The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."

    • More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Seeking lightweight open source BI software
    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 »
    Read all 8 answers   →
    What do you like most about IBM Cognos?
    Top Answer:It is a stable product.
    Read all 23 answers   →
    What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
    Top Answer:The solution's support needs improvement. Also, they should add better administrative tools.
    Read all 25 answers   →
    Seeking lightweight open source BI software
    Top Answer:There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows:  1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle  - look for SAP… more »
    Read all 8 answers   →
    Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualizati...
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Read all 18 answers   →
    What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Pla...
    Top Answer:Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up.
    Read all 37 answers   →
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 58 in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
    Views
    15,790
    Comparisons
    10,523
    Reviews
    17
    Average Words per Review
    532
    Rating
    8.1
    3rd
    out of 58 in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
    Views
    13,492
    Comparisons
    10,397
    Reviews
    32
    Average Words per Review
    653
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
    SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
    Learn More
    IBM
    SAP
    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.”

    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.

    The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.

    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features

    • Central management: Access all your BI from a single, central launchpad that can be customized to meet user-specific needs. The launchpad provides business users with access to all their BI tools, reports, notifications, and applications in a single place. This includes the ability to launch SAP Analytics Cloud.

    • Data visualization and analytics: Create powerful visualizations, dashboards, and applications to assess risk, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and enable users to analyze developments and data. Business insights can be shared with colleagues across enterprises.

    • Integration with Microsoft Office: Integrate with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA to power real-time analytics. For large-scale data analysis, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel to discover in-depth business insights and forecasts. Data analytics information can also be embedded into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

    • Cloud support: Extend and expand your BI on the cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud connects your BI to the cloud and offers enterprise planning and advanced analytics from a single online solution.

    Reviews from Real Users

    SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.

    A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."

    An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."

    A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. It has great visualization. 

    Offer
    Learn more about IBM Cognos
    Learn More
    Learn more about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
    Learn More
    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.
    SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
    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
    Manufacturing Company19%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Insurance Company8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise61%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise47%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    Buyer's Guide
    IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
    May 2023
    Free Report: IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
    Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
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    IBM Cognos is ranked 5th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 18 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 3rd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 32 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.2, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Helpful online community, highly reliable, and secure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Integrates very well with SAP ERP, allows you to scale up or down anytime, and is absolutely trustworthy". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft BI, Tableau, Oracle Hyperion, MicroStrategy and SQL Server, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft BI, Oracle OBIEE, MicroStrategy and Qlik Sense. See our IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.

    See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) 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.