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."We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"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 correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves. It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable."
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"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."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"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 platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."
"The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."
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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, Oracle Essbase and Looker. See our IBM Cognos vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
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