

IBM Cognos and Sigma compete in the data analytics sector. Sigma has the upper hand with its modern and agile solutions, making it appealing for many users.
Features: IBM Cognos offers robust reporting and analytics capabilities, extensive data integration, and powerful data visualization tools. Sigma leverages cloud-native capabilities, provides real-time collaboration, and allows direct data access without complex data modeling. The major distinction lies in Sigma's cloud-first approach compared to IBM Cognos's enterprise-grade analytics.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sigma's deployment is straightforward due to its cloud-native design, facilitating faster setup and integration. Its customer support is responsive, focusing on user experiences. IBM Cognos requires a more intricate setup process due to its complexity but offers extensive support services. The notable difference is Sigma’s ease of setup against Cognos’s comprehensive support features.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos involves a higher initial setup cost with significant infrastructure investment, providing long-term benefits for large-scale enterprise needs. Sigma typically has lower upfront costs due to its cloud-based model, delivering faster ROI, especially for businesses emphasizing agility. The primary difference is Sigma’s cost-effective model suitable for scalable deployment versus Cognos’s demanding framework requiring a higher initial investment.
It's essential for everything data-related within our company.
I have definitely seen a return on investment through time saving because once the dashboards are built, they are built.
I have seen a return on investment with Sigma; we already said that it saves about a quarter, it gets me to answers about 25% faster.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
As Sigma is a cloud platform, you do not need to do all that maintenance work.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
Permissions are easily set, so you only get to see what you need to see and you can share what needs to be shared.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
We did not face typical errors during our project with Sigma.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve.
We are generally satisfied, but I am not certain if IBM Cognos meets every feature request from users since we only provide IBM Cognos as our standard and do not maintain infrastructure for other tools.
The main improvement needed is in data modeling capabilities.
It is not as intuitive as I was hoping, so once you figure it out and get going, it is easy to use, but I would say at the very beginning, the learning experience is kind of hard.
Sigma lacks a versioning feature to track changes.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
The pricing of Sigma is a concern, as it restricts our ability to provide more users with report-creating capabilities due to the high cost of admin or report creator licenses.
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.
IBM Cognos is evaluated and complies fully with all our security standards.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
Sigma has positively impacted my organization because I think it has been a huge impact, and we use it for all our reporting and our dashboards for tracking.
The use of Sigma in decision-making, presentations to customers, and reporting to investors showcases its value in handling data-related tasks.
Sigma has positively affected my organization by saving us time in accessing information, which ultimately gets us to complete projects faster.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| IBM Cognos | 1.3% |
| Sigma | 1.6% |
| Other | 97.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 34 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 86 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 2 |
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:
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.”
Sigma is the next-generation of analytics for cloud data warehouses with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface that gives business experts the power to ask any question of their data no matter the query.
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