IBM Cognos vs Yellowfin comparison

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

• IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

Yellowfin offers a business intelligence (BI) platform that allows users to interact with big data in a variety of ways. Yellowfin works to provide big data access to companies of all sizes, from small business to billion-dollar enterprises. It is designed for providing data quickly and allowing users to filter for specific results, maximizing gain from big data. Yellowfin has a variety of dashboards so the user can filter, drill to detail, and have data analysis in the same browser. The data can also be easily shared with others via email, wiki embed, and reports. There is a mobile app as well, which works automatically with the desktop dashboards to allow users to access their data on the go, and alerts can be set up to notify a user via email or push to a mobile device if the data is indicating a critical event taking place. Yellowfin also can map data to locations, providing not only the what of data, but also the where. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust provides its community in England with mental health and community care services. Using Yellowfin's mobile business intelligence capabilities to deliver reporting and analytics to approximately 6000 clinicians, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust was able to greatly improve the quality of its patient care. Yellowfin allowed the Trust to access and share independent data from mobile devices as well as create a Balanced Scoreboard to quickly gather and report information on the company's performance to its executives, management, and directors.