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IBM Cognos vs Teradata comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 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
6.7
IBM Cognos offers mixed returns; some save significantly, others find it costly, but generally enhances insights and processes.
Sentiment score
8.1
Teradata boosts analytics speed over 100%, enhancing customer service and satisfaction, with high ROI and user approval.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.5
IBM Cognos support is responsive and expert but criticized for high costs, slow resolutions, and complexity in customer service.
Sentiment score
7.1
Teradata's customer service is praised for expertise but criticized for delays, with ratings ranging from 6 to 10 out of 10.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
The technical support from Teradata is quite advanced.
Customer support is very good, rated eight out of ten under our essential agreement.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Cognos offers scalable solutions, supporting large deployments with proper server architecture, powerful hardware, and seamless software integration.
Sentiment score
7.4
Teradata is praised for its scalability, speed, and flexibility, despite some complexity and cost challenges in cloud environments.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
This expansion can occur without incurring downtime or taking systems offline.
Scalability is complex as you need to purchase a license and coordinate with Teradata for additional disk space and CPU.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.2
IBM Cognos is praised for stability and performance, surpassing competitors, with minor issues often due to server configuration.
Sentiment score
8.4
Teradata excels in stability with minimal downtime, robust architecture, 99.9% uptime, and reliable performance, despite minor large dataset issues.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
I find the stability to be almost a ten out of ten.
The workload management and software maturity provide a reliable system.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM Cognos needs UI upgrades, better data visualization, improved performance, and advanced self-service features to compete with rivals.
Teradata users seek better transaction processing, enhanced scalability, modern interface, cloud focus, advanced analytics, and improved support and documentation.
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
Unlike SQL and Oracle, which have in-built replication capabilities, we don't have similar functionality with Teradata.
 

Setup Cost

IBM Cognos is costlier but offers extensive features, complex licensing, and competitive SaaS options for SMEs, emphasizing negotiation.
Teradata's high cost is justified by its superior performance, competitive total ownership costs, and flexible pricing models.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
Initially, it may seem expensive compared to similar cloud databases, however, it offers significant value in performance, stability, and overall output once in use.
Teradata is much more expensive than SQL, which is well-performed and cheaper.
 

Valuable Features

IBM Cognos offers powerful analytics, flexible reporting, strong visualization, and robust security with scalability and ease of use.
Teradata offers efficient, scalable data management with fast query performance, robust security, automation, and cloud flexibility for businesses.
IBM Cognos is a robust governed platform with significant security features and provides excellent graphics and reporting.
The data mover is valuable over the last two years as it allows us to achieve data replication to our disaster recovery systems.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (3rd)
Teradata
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
76
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (5th), Backup and Recovery (20th), Data Integration (15th), Relational Databases Tools (8th), Data Warehouse (3rd), Marketing Management (6th), Cloud Data Warehouse (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.3%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Teradata is 0.9%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AMOL JAJU - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ad hoc analysis reports and good for operational dashboarding
There used to be many valuable features, but in the last three or four years, whatever IBM is doing with enhancements, it has taken a lot of time to build and develop. But the best usage of Cognos is the ad hoc analysis reports. I really like that. Our customers also like that. But now the usage of Cognos and OBIE is reduced by various business users because people and business users are now more focused on analytics, slice and dice, and the dashboard, and the widgets.
RajeshKumar25 - PeerSpot reviewer
Harnessing advanced parallelism for top performance while embracing cloud trends
Teradata is primarily used for data warehousing across all customers. My clients have built-in applications that use Teradata, and their use varies from customer to customer, depending on the industry and database size. The primary function is as an OLAP analytical ecosystem Scalability is…
report
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
37%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Insurance Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
27%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
Comparing Teradata and Oracle Database, which product do you think is better and why?
I have spoken to my colleagues about this comparison and in our collective opinion, the reason why some people may declare Teradata better than Oracle is the pricing. Both solutions are quite simi...
Which companies use Teradata and who is it most suitable for?
Before my organization implemented this solution, we researched which big brands were using Teradata, so we knew if it would be compatible with our field. According to the product's site, the comp...
Is Teradata a difficult solution to work with?
Teradata is not a difficult product to work with, especially since they offer you technical support at all levels if you just ask. There are some features that may cause difficulties - for example,...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
IntelliFlex, Aster Data Map Reduce, , QueryGrid, Customer Interaction Manager, Digital Marketing Center, Data Mover, Data Stream Architecture
 

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.
Netflix
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Teradata and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.