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."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."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"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 Dynamic HTML (DHTML) client option of Webi has been enhanced adding features that were previously only available with the Java client including conditional formatting and support of XLS as a data provider."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"Business analytics are the most valuable features of this solution; I don't have experience with the other functional features offered."
"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
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"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"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 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."
"There should be more integration with other platforms."
"The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive. If you deal with a huge amount of data, you can go with BusinessObjects. However, if you are a medium-sized company with a modest amount of data, you can opt for another solution."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"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."
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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.
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