We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Windward Core based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"It is a stable product."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically."
"The engine being able to sit inside of our firewall is the most important feature."
"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."
"We can develop any report at least five times faster."
"The ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT."
"The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers."
"You can use Microsoft Office as your designer interface. There is very little programming. You can have nontechnical people create reports."
"One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"The solution's support could be better."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"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 next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment."
"Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same."
"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."
"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."
"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."
"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."
"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."
"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."
Earn 20 points
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Windward Core is ranked 24th in Reporting. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Windward Core is most compared with Docmosis, SAP Crystal Reports, Nintex Document Generation, OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting and CA Easytrieve Report Generator.
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