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."This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"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."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"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."
"The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features."
"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."
"The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"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 stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"The planning and dashboarding features have been useful. Additionally, the fixed-format reports are good."
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"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"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."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
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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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