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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
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (5th)
Workday Prism Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
19th
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 July 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 Workday Prism Analytics is 0.9%, down from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Workday Prism Analytics0.9%
Other97.7%
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

"We use it for financial purposes, and simple reporting."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The most valuable features are activity reports and visualization."
"We are able to rapidly communicate financial reporting and statements for reconciliation purposes."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Then, Cognos Datamanager can be very useful, sturdy, and flexible."
"IBM Cognos Analytics is a data discovery and reporting platform for your department or your entire enterprise."
"The product is easier to use compared to other applications."
"The customer service and support are pretty good."
"I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation."
"The solution is stable and reliable, with minimal issues affecting its performance."
"Feature-wise, I feel that the solution's stability is good."
 

Cons

"Technical support is 6/10, more for the IBM partner from which we purchased the Cognos licenses."
"After spending a day working in the editor on a report, the UI gets slower and slower."
"I give this solution a rating of five out of 10 because it's not very user friendly."
"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."
"IBM Cognos can improve its error messages, as whenever something is wrong, it does not give us the proper error message, and we end up rebooting the entire software."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions."
"It could have more options for themes."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the ability to manually update individual rows or columns of data once it has been uploaded."
"It is not a very scalable product."
"When you create certain objects, a lot of the time, the fields are text. They’re not numeric, date, or any other field type"
"The visualization techniques must be upgraded."
"There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"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."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"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."
"I do not know of the licensing cost, but there are additional costs like 5,00,000 for recruitment modules."
"Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool."
"The solution is very expensive."
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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
6%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
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, ...
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: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.