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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
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
136
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (5th)
Tungsten Insight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
42nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Process Mining (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 3.6% 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 Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Tungsten Insight0.6%
Other98.1%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2648136 - PeerSpot reviewer
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized reporting has supported university-wide regulatory dashboards and secure data access
From my experience, we use regular dashboarding with IBM Cognos for producing scheduled reports and for mandatory regulatory reporting. All our departments use IBM Cognos, with each department developing their own reports while our corporate IT team provides the data. Some people use the interactive dashboards feature of IBM Cognos, and there are also other tools in use. I think some users utilize Power BI and Tableau, but our IT organization only provides IBM Cognos as an enterprise business intelligence and reporting tool. IBM Cognos is evaluated and complies fully with all our security standards. In my opinion, IBM Cognos is very stable. It has been around for many years and many users are familiar with it, ensuring it performs well in its intended capacity. The benefits of choosing IBM Cognos, aside from cost savings, include having institutional knowledge for maintaining this infrastructure and a reliable solution that enhances developer productivity, given our team's extensive experience with IBM Cognos.
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

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It provides the ability to design applications directly."
"You can easily customize reporting to pull the fields that interest you."
 

Cons

"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"The initial setup is complex and would be difficult to carry out without any training."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"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."
"The solution is affordable."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
Information not available
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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
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise86
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 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?
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. The more I use this platform, the more ...
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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: December 2025.
880,954 professionals have used our research since 2012.