IBM Cognos Analytics

4.1 (131)
Business intelligence suite

Overall rating

4.1 /5
(131)
Value for Money
3.9/5
Features
4.1/5
Ease of Use
3.8/5
Customer Support Software
3.8/5
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131 Reviews

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Government Administration
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Business Intellegnce Software with Standard Reporting And Self Service BI

Reviewed on 16/10/2018

Overall it is a great product to use

Pros

Cognos Analytics is a flexible software for Standard Business Intelligence Reporting as well as for Self Service Data Visualization capability. You have the option to connect to a variety of the Data Sources as well as Multi-Dimensional Cubes. The new invention of Cognos Analytics software provides a greater flexibility for enterprise deployments and upgrades. It has the new feature of NLP (natural language processing) for predictive analytics by IBM Watson.

Cons

Too many modelling tools (Cognos FrameWork Manager, Dynamic Cube Designer, Cognos Transformer) for modelling the content. Too many studios (Report Studio, Query Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio) for report development. Maintainence and cost is huge

Robert
Overall rating
  • Industry: Construction
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

Full-featured, slightly behind the curve.

Reviewed on 26/11/2021

It brings a lot of functionality all under one roof. Our team found the "visualization" a little easier in Cognos vs Power BI, but the paginated reporting better in SSRS/PBIRS. We ended up transitioning entirely from Cognos to the MS stack and the broad consensus by the team is it was an overall welcomed upgrade. We're starting to consider Tableau or Looker, but returning to Cognos isn't on our horizon.

Pros

The ability to visualize data in many way all using the same utility is beneficial so we don't have to worry about multiple deployment/support patterns. Having an in-memory OLAP option made performance less of an issue compared to hitting an on-prem database directly for everything. The ability to add custom code allows for some really creative solutions to unique business problems in reporting.

Cons

We felt the interface and functionality was a little dated - our more technical employees were fine but the more analyst-type developers preferred something "prettier"/"friendlier" like Tableau/Power BI. It also got expensive for us which was one of the two the primary reasons we transitioned. This is obviously dependent on the number of users, so consider your own environment of course.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 6.0 /10

IBM Cognos Report Studio

Reviewed on 28/03/2019

I would recommend for company reporting, works great with a big database

Pros

Complex reports can be achieved with IBM Cognos Report studio, great for setting up scheduled reports.

Cons

Interface is not user friendly, certain features are not logically placed.Charts are not great when downloaded into Excel.

Michael
Overall rating
  • Industry: Primary/Secondary Education
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

IBM Cognos Review

Reviewed on 23/02/2017

My company has been using IBM Cognos for the past 4 years. When we purchased IBM Cognos it was the best fit for our situation. It has been a valued piece of software in our business. It has given us the ability to tie data from multiple data sources. It has given the ability for our departments to run reports that we haven't been able to in the past.

Pros

The software is very intuitive. If you have knowledge of SQL, it is a very easy software to pick up. The Help portion of the Cognos interface is very helpful also.

Cons

Customer Support for this product isn't the best. We have been on Cognos 10.1.1 for a while and when it came up for licensing renewal, we were charged for a newer version of Data Manger. When we inquired about this through our support contract we were going to be charged for the new software.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Invaluable Business Intelligence

Reviewed on 06/09/2019

Data is extremely vital to any organization and the ability to generate useful reports and dashboards on demand across multiple sources is invaluable.

Pros

Scheduling reports, configuring prompt pages on reports for users to run a standardized report with custom filters are both fantastic features that I used hundreds of times across all reporting.

Cons

Report building was intuitive for a power user but average users found it overwhelming. This just meant a bit more training from my department.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Higher Education Software
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Great Analytics Tool

Reviewed on 24/10/2019

Overall, I would recommend using Cognos Analytics for data analysis. My whole company uses it from daily reporting to more advanced analyses.

Pros

IBM Cognos Analytics is a great data analytics tool. It can handle a lot of data and makes it easy for users to create reports to view their data. I like that it allows for a variety of output formats.

Cons

Cognos Analytics can be hard to learn how to use. You have to really understand your data first so that you can figure out how to make the tool do what you need it to do.

Michelle
Overall rating
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software

This report writer is linked to our accounting software.

Reviewed on 29/03/2018

Pros

You can write your own reports and pull out the data you need from our accounting software. You have the ability to create advanced reports and format in multiple ways.

Cons

Sometimes the fields that are in Cognos do not match exactly or have different names from the actual software so it is a guess at what field you are pulling. The report studio portion is advanced report writing and in order to create these reports it is recommended to have additional training in order to make reports be beneficial for your company.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Higher Education Software
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Good Tool for Data Reporting

Reviewed on 14/02/2019

IBM Cognos Analytics is a great enterprise tool for data reporting. There are a lot of report options and it is easy to collaborate and share reports with colleagues.

Pros

IBM Cognos Analytics is a great tool for data reporting. It is easy to use and easy to see data relationships. It has a lot of reporting options and the folder structure is nice.

Cons

It can be kind of hard to learn and there are not a ton of helpful resources online.

Eddy
Overall rating
  • Industry: Management Consulting
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 3.0 /10

Powerful but complicated

Reviewed on 12/11/2020

Implementing the tool is painful but once is running is great.

Pros

Being a IBM product it pack quality. great functionalities and features that defeat the competition.

Cons

It's hard to setup.
Installation and configuration process is a pain.
The space usage for this software is to high.
The IBM Windows services is slow on startup and service errors can be very difficult to diagnose due to bad log structure or description.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 5.0 /10

Before leaving their Web version, they had a very good desktop application

Reviewed on 22/05/2018

with it we can visualize in a more comfortable way our information of DW and cubes

Pros

Before leaving their Web version, they had a very good desktop application, but they discontinued it. is a powerful tool, with ease for the reporter

Cons

it is traumatic for its administration, it depends on the active directory, which can be an advantage, but in other cases it makes it cumbersome

CHANDAR
Overall rating
  • Industry: Human Resources
  • Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

COGNOS

Reviewed on 10/11/2016

Cognos makes it easy to design reports that match the look-and-feel required by the client. Report rendering time is also very fast. Browser support can be touchy and Dynamic Cubes are very hardware intensive.Cognos has strong out of the box capabilities with a wide array of add-ons, and good interoperability with other IBM analytics and data suites

Pros

Compatibility mode queries allow for custom ODBC and JDBC connection to made, so even if there is no native compatibility other databases can still be used as a source if needed.
Dynamic Cubes are capable of querying against millions of rows in seconds when properly set up with sufficient hardware resources.
Standard Reports are snappy, returning data and rendering quickly, as long as the pagination is kept to reasonable quantities.

Cons

Due to Active Reports packaging all of the data in the file and prerendering charts, file size can get quite large (easily several megabytes) and the initial load time can be quite long when opening it. It is best used for basic overviews and other times when some "flash" is needed, but not a large amount of data.
Configuring the interoperability with TM1 and SPSS is a little more on the technical side than most other tasks.
You could call the development process "Front heavy" meaning most of the development will be modeling. This means that it will take longer to end up with visualized data than other tools.

Beena
Overall rating
  • Industry: Information Technology & Services
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

I feel Cognos is the best BI Product that I have come across.

Reviewed on 26/02/2018

Data Analytics, Dashboards, Complex KPI reports, Event studio objects

Pros

Very structured, Reporting features are very good and we can make use of various functions, Event studio tool is the most powerful.

Cons

I wish if natural language feature is added to Cognos. When it comes to the calculated fields we need to write functions in Cognos, but if IBM Cognos can make built in functions like Microsoft power BI then that would be awesome. High pricing is another factor.

Sagar
Overall rating
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software

Great Reporting tool for your datawarehousing need

Reviewed on 03/07/2018

Pros

Cognos tool suite is perfect for your enterprise needs, with different tool available for different user level. The tool can handle all the reporting needs (charts, table, list, crosstab). With the addition of active reports and Cognos mobile it makes a complete solution

Cons

Enhancement of geographical reporting, current available option for Maps are very limited and should be extended.

Sayali
Overall rating
  • Industry: Real Estate
  • Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
  • Used Daily for 6-12 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Reviewing IBM Cognos Analytics

Reviewed on 16/09/2019

I have a pretty decent experience with cognos with some of the new inbuilt features but there is always a scope of improvement

Pros

I love the fact that Cognos Analytics is so flexible as we deal with a lot of reports which needs to be emailed to the higher authorities as and when they run. Cognos has this inbuild feature, where it can also write the reports to the internal file system. This helps us to keep a track of the recipients of the reports.

Cons

The Cognos 10 version was a little laid back on the visualization side as it did not had much interactive visuals available for reporting. But they have overcome it in Cognos 11 version.

Kim
Overall rating
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 0.0 /10

Almost unworkable product

Reviewed on 08/06/2017

A reporting framework that can be used to access back end data.

Pros

Unfortunately, there is not much to write in this section. The only possible "pro" in all cases would be the flexibility offered in the product as far as setting up the framework. Other than that, not much to like.

Cons

User interface was slow and clumsy. The user experience was not smooth at all. There was no ease of use whatsoever. The retrieval times from the back end were even worse. We had to retrofit an existing n-tier system to use the reporting side of this software and it was a disaster. There is no way I would recommend to anyone to purchase this system.

Katherine
Overall rating
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Cognos is it!

Reviewed on 13/06/2018

Pros

Cognos has such great data available and we use it through our HRIS - it has changed the way we report out on data

Cons

The only hard thing is getting used to the reporting, but once you learn then it is smooth sailing!!

Sue
Overall rating
  • Used Daily for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software

Ok tool

Reviewed on 30/05/2018

Pros

I had used the IBM Cognod Sales Compensation tool while working a global high tech company. It took a while to learn the system but once you figure it out then it was easy to use and configure the plans.

Cons

The only issue I had at the time was the very long time it would take to run a calculations. Average was an hour.

Brian
Overall rating
  • Industry: Hospital & Health Care
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Weekly for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

Tons of Features, very powerful, not for a novice

Reviewed on 05/12/2019

I have been very pleased with it since getting over the giant hurdle that is learning how to do anything at all in the product.

Pros

It can handle enormous amounts of data and allows a user to create extremely complex data models from almost any number of disparate sources

Cons

Super complex and difficult to learn. The least intuitive software I have ever used, and the help documentation is pretty much useless.

Tanzeela
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Company size: 51–200 Employees
  • Used Daily for 6-12 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

One of the most recommended Software for Dashboarding

Reviewed on 14/02/2021

Pros

I would definitely recommend this to people who want to create effective dashboards and reports. It has user friendly interface. I is good alternative for tableau or power BI.

Cons

It needs to upgrade a little bit to give features like Power BI

Kinjal
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

I am a BI developer

Reviewed on 03/03/2015

Pros

I like its functionality and different features. I also like the ease of use.

Cons

Cognos's support sometimes is not as it should be. The support should be quick and accurate, and Cognos should have more error details to track down the solution. The majority of time, the error doesn't provide meaningful info, so it is always difficulty to track down the solution.

Bret
Overall rating
  • Industry: Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing
  • Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use

Cognos Sucks!

Reviewed on 28/11/2017

Pros

Cognos has some good time based accounting features that allow you to go back and look at how much was booked and when.

Cons

Getting the Cognos reports to match up. Some reports update once a week others are daily. This makes it difficult to see how much is actually going to be spent. Having to pull multiple reports to get the information that is needed wastes time.

Deb
Overall rating
  • Industry: Primary/Secondary Education
  • Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

Expensive but Good

Reviewed on 09/07/2018

Pros

This product will do just about anything you want it to do. It does take more of a skilled employee in order to create things. However, anyone can run things once they are created.

Cons

This product is pricey, especially for a mid range company. It takes a lot of training and setup to get the product going as one would like.

Hilary
Overall rating
  • Industry: Banking
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 7.0 /10

Cognos Developer

Reviewed on 27/07/2019

Pros

Cognos is a great tool for reporting. The visuals are not awesome but there is a lot of customization you can do for reporting.

Cons

It can be difficult to learn at first. It is not as easy to pick up as Tabeau. Googling for solutions can be tough.

Ric
Overall rating
  • Industry: Computer Software
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

IBM Cognos Business Power

Reviewed on 24/04/2015

Pros

This software is very flexible and extensive enough to meet almost any of your needs. The reporting engine allows for complex queries and views that far surpass standard reporting methods.

Cons

While I was not involved in the purchase of the software it is my understanding the cost was a little high and this is not designed for novice users.

Verified Reviewer
Overall rating
  • Industry: Medical Devices
  • Company size: 201–500 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support Software
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

IBM Cognos is a top business analytics software keeping internal reporting easy

Reviewed on 20/08/2022

It has been good, but I am still looking for the best to match my business practices

Pros

It allows the user to create reports and customize based on user needs

Cons

It is expensive compared to a lot of the other software out there