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IBM Cognos vs Tungsten Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (6th)
Tungsten Insight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
41st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tungsten Insight is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Tungsten Insight0.6%
Other98.0%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
reviewer2005506 - PeerSpot reviewer
Major Account Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Great reporting and customizations with good reliability
A lot of the improvement is not so much the product as it is how it's deployed; it's about mapping against what you need to improve your processes, whether it's the Kofax kind of shows in the IDP. You've got process orchestration, extraction and robotic process automation, process orchestration, and then mobile. Tracking what you need out of those, either all five together or one of those separated out, is usually what's more critical. They do add capabilities to the tool. However, from our perspective as a consulting organization, the real key is whether you are getting the data you need to improve your process or if your reporting is not providing you with the desired information you need to improve your processes. If there's any negative, it's just the different names, the branding names that the product's gone through. It's confusing.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For our clients, this product helps them make decisions faster, based on high-quality data."
"The solution connects to all data sources easily."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"IBM's support community is excellent, and there's a large knowledge base if we have any problems."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"IBM Cognos is a good tool for viewing reports, allows us to use the tool in an interactive and easy way, with the option to display it on various mobile devices."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Can do most things we need it do."
"It provides the ability to design applications directly."
"The designer and workspace tools in Kofax Insight are good, providing the ability to design applications directly and read various types of PDF images, handwritten files and cheques, transferring the data from these images into the database and making it accessible on mobile and computer devices."
"The solution is easy to manage, very easy to scan and archive documents, and after digitizing it is very easy to reach archived documents."
"Based on my experience, it's been a very, very good product, a very powerful insight analytics or business KPI-type tool that provides a very good data-based review of intelligent document processing and allows clients to develop their own reliable, customized reports."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"You can easily customize reporting to pull the fields that interest you."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The price is a bit expensive."
"The main improvement required is to help users with the full vision about the product according to their need."
"Need to integrate Data Discovery capabilities"
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The reporting output/UI is quite old-fashioned."
"Report authoring is sometimes difficult for authors without specific computer knowledge with regard to concepts related to database, i.e., join, union, etc."
"The reporting and internal integration systems could be improved by making them more user-friendly."
"It would be ideal if there were some standard forms that could be customized."
"If there's any negative, it's just the different names, the branding names that the product's gone through. It's confusing."
"The initial setup is complex and would be difficult to carry out without any training."
"The solution is not cheap. It is a bit pricey, and therefore more suited towards larger companies."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"Pricing should be improved."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
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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
13%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Performing Arts
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
No data available
 

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 needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Regarding improvements for IBM Cognos, I think nothing yet about functionality, but I find the costs to be quite high for the enterprise system. However, since we need it, we continue to renew our ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos at my place of work is primarily for business intelligence (BI), mostly for serving, and we appreciate it because it covers the full BI stack, including dashboards, ...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Kofax Insight
 

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.
Infosys,HMI, krungsri, Cegeka
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Tungsten Insight and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.