We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, reports are generated and automatically sent according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month."
"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature."
"It is solid and stable."
"Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up."
"Way of creating reports."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"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."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. 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 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, MicroStrategy and Looker. See our IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.