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."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."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"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 most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
"Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
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"The solution's support could be better."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"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."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"It is not simple to use."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
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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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