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."Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities."
"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions. If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships."
"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."
"We find the product to be very stable."
"This reporting and broadcasting solution has a lot of flexibilities and can connect to multiple source systems."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
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"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"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 solution's support could be better."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
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IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 129 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, Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, 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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