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 use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"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."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The scheduling and publication features are very useful."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"The solution can scale."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"Way of creating reports."
"We find the product to be very stable."
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"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"There should be more integration with other platforms."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."
"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"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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