We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"The product is easy to use."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Looker is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and IBM Controller, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and Domo.
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