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IBM Cognos vs SAP Crystal Reports comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.5
IBM Cognos offers enhanced decision-making, cost savings, and productivity, reporting over $650k annual savings through efficient, user-friendly systems.
Sentiment score
5.7
SAP Crystal Reports greatly enhances ERP reporting and efficiency, offering ROI over 1000%, despite costly user training.
I have seen a return on investment, as I mentioned earlier about time saving and productivity gains, with a consistent governed data model that reduces the risk of errors.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Cognos customer service is mixed, with good technical support and resources, yet varying speed and consistency.
Sentiment score
5.7
SAP Crystal Reports customer support is inconsistent, with mixed reviews, leading users to favor online resources and self-help solutions.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
Senior Project Manager at BD
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
I have not encountered any problems requiring assistance.
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
IBM Cognos handles large-scale data needs efficiently, though performance can vary with hardware, integration, configuration, and user training.
Sentiment score
7.6
SAP Crystal Reports supports scalability and is suitable for medium to large enterprises, with room for scalability improvements.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is very good, as it has continued growing with my organization's needs, allowing us to analyze and store a significant amount of data and handle our organization's growth efficiently.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
IBM Cognos is stable and reliable, though issues can arise with server capacity, configurations, and during peak usage.
Sentiment score
7.1
SAP Crystal Reports is stable on Windows, with Unix challenges and improved performance on specialized servers post-2011.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Room For Improvement

IBM Cognos needs UI and mobile enhancements, better data visualization, improved support, and cost efficiency for user satisfaction.
SAP Crystal Reports needs better visualization, modern tech integration, improved analytics, compatibility, and enhanced documentation and support.
Integration with Azure login makes trouble.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
Senior Project Manager at BD
IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
If it is closed due to any problem, it should be able to recover where I left off, similar to Excel, which should be a feature for SAP Crystal Reports.
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
Enabling better practices and testing to enhance data accuracy and efficiency for company sectors.
Inhouse SAP Business One Sr. Consultant at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
It would be beneficial to have easier integration with Azure, Microsoft Power Platform, and similar cloud technologies.
I'm at DTS Group
 

Setup Cost

IBM Cognos is costly compared to competitors but offers extensive features, with complex licensing and potential discounts available.
SAP Crystal Reports pricing perceptions vary; some find it costly, but discounts and volume deals can reduce expenses.
Our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
Vice President at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Valuable Features

IBM Cognos provides AI-powered insights, intuitive dashboards, and advanced reporting tools, enhancing automation, scalability, and comprehensive business intelligence.
SAP Crystal Reports provides flexible data connectivity, custom design, and efficient reporting, enhancing decision-making and client communication.
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech
I love the seamless and efficient data integration capability of IBM Cognos Analytics, where it allows us easy merging of data from various sources such as customer feedback and sales figures.
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
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.
Senior Project Manager at BD
SAP Crystal Reports has had a very positive impact and benefits. It's a powerful tool to design any kind of report if you have knowledge of the database, and it can attach to both HANA and SQL databases.
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
The efficiency gained by our organization from SAP Crystal Reports is measurable through multiple export formats such as PDF and Excel.
Inhouse SAP Business One Sr. Consultant at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees
The best features SAP Crystal Reports offers are powerful data connectivity, customized report design, interactive and visual reports, import, export, sharing options, and automation and scheduling.
I'm at DTS Group
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th)
SAP Crystal Reports
Ranking in Reporting
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
52
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.2%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Crystal Reports is 2.6%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Cognos3.2%
SAP Crystal Reports2.6%
Other94.2%
Reporting
 

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.
Salman Mukhtar Baig - PeerSpot reviewer
SAP Technical Manager at VS Furniture Middle East
Unlock data insights with seamless integration and robust reporting features
I assess the impact of SAP Crystal Reports' dynamic parameters on the customization and flexibility of my reports as very good. Sometimes it creates a problem when it suddenly closes during work due to improper shutdowns, but most of the time it's beneficial since I can fetch the data in one report very efficiently, which is great for the company. The sub reports in SAP Crystal Reports help me enhance the depth and detail of my reports by allowing me to use multiple sets of records, especially when I have very large requirements, such as company dashboards that show what sales, purchases, productions, and HR are doing. Using sub reports as the main report is very beneficial because I can pull multiple department data into the main report. Over the years, SAP Crystal Reports has had a very positive impact and benefits. It's a powerful tool to design any kind of report if you have knowledge of the database, and it can attach to both HANA and SQL databases. I can also connect this data with Excel, which makes it a very powerful tool for me.
report
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882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

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 Business18
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise22
 

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...
What needs improvement with SAP Crystal Reports?
SAP Crystal Reports could be improved with more modern user-friendly interfaces and better integration with cloud platforms and AI tools. It would be beneficial to have easier integration with Azur...
What is your primary use case for SAP Crystal Reports?
I have been using SAP Crystal Reports for six months. I am using SAP Crystal Reports to develop data-driven reports and use customer data printing. When I use SAP Crystal Reports for customer data ...
What do you like most about SAP Crystal Reports?
We use SAP Crystal Reports for operational reporting.
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

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.
City of Buenos Aires, ASR Group, Citrix, EarlySense, Usha International Limited, Automotive Resources International (ARI), LivePerson, Coelba (Grupo Neoenergia), RZD Russian Railways, National Basketball Association - NBA, TALLY WEiJL, El Machetazo, Young Heroes, Mozzart, Mitsui Knowledge Industry (MKI) , Surgutneftegas Open Joint Stock Company, The VELUX Group, AOK Bundesverband, AL-KO KOBER GROUP
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. SAP Crystal Reports and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.