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IBM Cognos vs Workday Prism Analytics 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
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (3rd)
Workday Prism Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 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 Workday Prism Analytics is 1.1%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Workday Prism Analytics1.1%
Other97.6%
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.
Sarvesh Kumar Jha - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technology Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers
Provides great flexibility in terms of data transformation
I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation. Workday introduced Prism Analytics mainly because many clients wanted to merge data from different systems and then work with it to get some insights out of it. For that, they previously used tools like Power BI. Workday Prism Analytics gives you the power to do all the data transformations within Workday itself without taking out crucial data to a third system. I really like the way Workday has enabled Prism Analytics to be that one solution where you can bring everything. It also provides you the flexibility that things like the security model of Workday are still in place. You don't have to redo your security configuration if you do the data transformation outside Workday.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Moving away from a manual, Excel-based consolidation to a largely automated one has enabled us to reduce our reporting timelines."
"We are using the self-service capabilities for business users in the new version and it is a blessing to us because now we don't feel any pain with regards to the IT department."
"Allowed the organizations I've worked for to standardize the information they deliver to hundreds of decision makers."
"I have not encountered any stability issues."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"This is an all-in-one solution that provides reporting for a lot of different reports and visualizations."
"IBM Cognos is a very comprehensive analytics tool that dissolves the challenge of turning complex and large data sets into clear, actionable insights by providing an intuitive platform for data visualization and reporting."
"I love the new user interface! Finally, Cognos BI has a new face."
"The product is easier to use compared to other applications."
"The solution is stable and reliable, with minimal issues affecting its performance."
"Feature-wise, I feel that the solution's stability is good."
"I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation."
"The customer service and support are pretty good."
 

Cons

"The upgrade process is always a challenge, as it is basically a reinstall each time."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"Too many questions were answered with “upgrading to 10.2.2 will solve the problem”. This seemed to be IBM’s knee jerk reaction to uncommon, but known issues."
"Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"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."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay."
"We see a lot of issues in Cognos in terms of storage as well as a lot of failures on a daily basis."
"When you create certain objects, a lot of the time, the fields are text. They’re not numeric, date, or any other field type"
"It is not a very scalable product."
"There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics."
"The visualization techniques must be upgraded."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the ability to manually update individual rows or columns of data once it has been uploaded."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing should be improved."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"It is pretty expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I do not know of the licensing cost, but there are additional costs like 5,00,000 for recruitment modules."
"The solution is very expensive."
"Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool."
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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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise90
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?
One area where IBM Cognos can be improved is that customer service sometimes is not very responsive, and I would love to see the user interface improved, especially to look somehow updated. In addi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workday Prism Analytics?
Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool. In fact, that has been one of the hindrance factors for Workday in making Prism Analytics more sellable.
What needs improvement with Workday Prism Analytics?
I think there are still some gaps in the solution. There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics. For now, Workday has enabled the SFTP server and Am...
What is your primary use case for Workday Prism Analytics?
As a consultant, I use Prism Analytics to implement my client systems. I first have design sessions with them, where we discuss their business gaps and then understand how Workday Prism Analytics c...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Prism Analytics
 

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.
Denny's
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Workday Prism Analytics and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,264 professionals have used our research since 2012.