IBM Cognos Reviews

Vendor: IBM

4.0 out of 5

132 reviews
91% willing to recommend

6,214 followers

What is IBM Cognos?

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.

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IBM Cognos is the #4 ranked solution in top Reporting Tools and #6 ranked solution in top Business Intelligence Tools. PeerSpot users give IBM Cognos an average rating of 8.0 out of 10. IBM Cognos is most commonly compared to Microsoft Power BI: IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI. IBM Cognos is popular among the midsize enterprise segment, accounting for 64% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 60% of all views.

Helped 793,295 peers since 2012

Featured reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

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Kumar Gurram

Senior Business Analyst at HSBC

You can use the dashboard to determine where it stands based on the graph. The amount is included in the dashboard. We use data from the United States, the UK, Germany, and Japan. The data is stored in our CCS report. Based on the ID, we can retrieve specific data within that report. Certain portions of the data will display information for only one particular country. This restriction confines the data within the report. We are implementing security measures to ensure data integrity. Some users access IBM Cognos directly for their businesses, while others log in to the Cognos console portal. These users interact with the actual JavaScript within the portal. This process may require additional time for adjustments, including those related to the DKA component. If you have the budget, you can opt for Cognos; otherwise, you can opt for Power BI. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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Gnanavel-Chakkarapani

Junior Consultant at CMA CGM

When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos. It is mainly useful for management meetings since it allows one to see KPIs, which helps the management-level people in a company to make decisions. Speaking about the tool's valuable features for analytics needs, compared to the previous versions of the tool, I believe that the new version of the solution has introduced auto-generated facilities, like drag and drop, which is very useful for business users to develop reports easily. In the past, packages were deployed using a framework manager, but now, with the new functionalities, you can directly upload CSV files to deal with areas concerning the sales team or validation of payments. The sales team can directly import the payment validation files. The product helps sales teams since it allows users to directly upload and see the results in reports without the help of any technical people. I am very satisfied with the product's reporting capabilities. The use of Excel format before sending emails to users is very helpful, especially for those who are in different countries, like Australia or the USA. The sunburst part associated with reports is very helpful for many. The scorecard widgets in the tool are mainly useful for the KPI part. It helps to keep a tab on the monthly achievements. It helps users to look at how much they have achieved in their company and the actual number of units booked or sold by their organization. A minimum of two people are required to maintain the product. With the new version of the tools having many additional integrations and connectivities, I can see technologies like Snowflake and Salesforce integrated with IBM Cognos. The tool's integration capabilities will be helpful in the future. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it, especially for handling the reporting part. The product's security features are also very good compared to the other tools in the market. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

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IBM Cognos mindshare

Product category:

As of July 2024, the mindshare of IBM Cognos in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category stands at 3.2%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."

Room for Improvement

"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"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."

Pricing

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"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."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our IBM Cognos Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Review data by company size

By reviewers

By visitors reading reviews

Top industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

60%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

University

Insurance Company

Healthcare Company

Retailer

Energy/Utilities Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Construction Company

Non Profit

Comms Service Provider

Media Company

Legal Firm

Hospitality Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

Transportation Company

Outsourcing Company

Compare IBM Cognos with alternative products

Learn more about IBM Cognos

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.”

IBM Cognos was previously known as Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics.

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IBM Cognos 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.