IBM Cognos Analytics Reviews

It has a nice user interface, with multiple customization options, attractive panels and excellent performance. It has the useful drag and drop tool that makes it easy to manipulate data to create nice visualizations. Provides high quality and visually pleasing real-time reports. The mobile application works very well, giving the platform greater mobility.

I would like them to improve the documentation to start using the platform more easily and get the most out of all its functions. Its cost is considerably high.

Cognos 11 comes with all the latest features expected in a BI tool, the graph generations and story buildings as well as predictions.

Interactive pdf is not available for reports. Can be difficult to implement without admin support for end users.

The quick learning curve which turns every intuition into a positive experience

The story telling capabilities are not seamless enough and consume too much efforts to be reach the desired effect.

Easily integrating with most of the ERPs, very good for customizing reports, very detailed reporting

Tough to learn & not many resources available, you will get the value of the money invested in it only if you are able to get the most out of it

Capabilities of this software is far reaching and varied and it depends on the organisation ability to use it to their advantage.

the support from the consultant was great but costly.

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.

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.

It allows you to connect the data thrown by different sources and create personalized reports that you can share in real time. It allows planning operations based on pre-established rules to model the entire business process and obtain the best results on the implemented strategies.

Its license has a high cost compared to similar platforms. It has a steep learning curve and its user interface has a lot of room for improvement.

It's been a long on the market.
It's offered by IBM
It has a great integration with many databases

New version (CA 11) has some inconvenient UI changes (new side panel which does not allow to easily navigate and see all properties)
Many things need to be done manually instead of integrating as best practices (security, deployments, testing, version control, etc.)
New studios are not that intuitive / transparent

- The application designed to enable business users with limited technical knowledge to extract data, analyze it and make business decision based on the analysis;
- It could be used within relational or multidimensional data sources;
- It is included a mobile version allowing users to access a complete version of Cognos from mobile devices;

- very sensitive in implementation;
- requiring significant resources in order to maintain and support;
- too expensive for mid-size companies;

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

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

I think this tool is quite good, since it allows the user several functionalities: create and adapt BI reports, automate the export of a report in a set period and for the necessary containers (they do not need a license to receive), etc. . I love working with this tool from IBM. It allows some SQL language, and some configuration features that are very good too.

One thing I can point out as a cons of this tool, is the fact that it does not always return the correct information (because the user, without knowing it, can mix incompatible information) - and only at a more advanced stage do we notice that the information is not correct - because we have no error information.
When we actually have information about the errors, this is also not very detailed, that is, we are left without knowing what the error is anyway. It is difficult to make correct associations in this tool, because it is very restricted in relation to the use of the database and the compatibility of the data between them.

Well established took with huge user base and support. Being IBMs main BI tool, it comes with a lot of Support and Knowledge Base. There are tons of supporting products for Advanced Analytics, Visualization and AI/ML which makes the tool both powerful and versatile. It fits into both departmental BI as well as for Enterprise wide reporting.

IBM should increase the support the provide for their products. It is difficult to get quick help from IBM.Self service features of the tool and not as easy as other contemporary tools like Tableau and Qlikview. IBM has catching up to do in this area. Also cloud based SAAS is not yet advanced for COGNOS.

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.

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.

the powerful framework manager, allow us to implement complicated logic into model and deliver a package to end user, business user can do ad-hoc report easily.

steep learning curve for beginners. not mention people who doesn't have BI experience, Had a few new team members from tableau background. the FM package complexity is much more than they have done in the tableau data source.

Cognos is an incredibly powerful reporting tool offered by IBM and it has a wonderful ability to be customized across different industries and companies. It can transform work efficiency but automating virtually any data that exists in a company's primary accounting and finance system.

Cognos is not very user-friendly and often times it can take a while for an individual working with Congos to get familiar with the functionality and the power this tool possesses. Furthermore, report writing and query studio functionality require some database knowledge so the true power of the tool is sometimes limited by these factors.

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.

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

IBM Cognos TM1 facilitates the creation of business models with the participation and contribution of users throughout the organization regardless of their physical location.
TM1 is a enterprise-level platform that allows an integral, flexible, rigorous and perfect control over the users that contribute with the creation of the budget.
It allows building multidimensional models that incorporate the business rules that govern the financial processes of the company.

IBM Cognos TM1 needs to train personnel to administer the platform.
The construction of the models requires specialized IT staff.
The cost of the licenses is for medium and large companies.

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.

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.

Cognos Analytics has really great capabilities. There is so much that you can do with the framework if you know what you're doing. Good security features. Good for enterprise level reporting.

If you're hoping this will replace a dedicated reporting team or IT team, it will not. The ease of use depends on several factors and be SURE that you have an experienced team built the framework. No support whatsoever from Cognos themselves for end users, and they take a long time to get back to us on issues. The new visualizations can be clunky, especially maps. They are unusable for detailed maps. Scheduling features slow down the system considerably.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

you can combine multiple queries in one report to create your desired report, which can be formatted in multiple ways to meet your desired structure.

its little bit tricky to handle. You need to understand it thoroughly which actually takes time to began working with it from scratch. Also lacks the graphics and user interface.

It is straight-forward and feature-rich. We have combined dozens and dozens of queries into a single report without any issue before, so it has that advantage over most of the alternative solutions.

The version of Cognos we are running currently makes it difficult to pinpoint the bottle-neck of certain reports.

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

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.