We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and ThoughtSpot 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."Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"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."
"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."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"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."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."
"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases."
"ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"The scalability is good."
"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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."
"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."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."
"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."
"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."
"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."
"The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot."
"In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do."
"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."
"The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while ThoughtSpot is ranked 15th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 8 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while ThoughtSpot is rated 7.6. 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 ThoughtSpot writes "You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas ThoughtSpot is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight and Angles Professional. See our IBM Cognos vs. ThoughtSpot report.
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