We performed a comparison between Databricks and IBM Cognos based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms."The most valuable feature is the ability to use SQL directly with Databricks."
"I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature."
"Databricks is a unified solution that we can use for streaming. It is supporting open source languages, which are cloud-agnostic. When I do database coding if any other tool has a similar language pack to Excel or SQL, I can use the same knowledge, limiting the need to learn new things. It supports a lot of Python libraries where I can use some very easily."
"Databricks' Lakehouse architecture has been most useful for us. The data governance has been absolutely efficient in between other kinds of solutions."
"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"The simplicity of development is the most valuable feature."
"We can scale the product."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"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 solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"Databricks is an analytics platform. It should offer more data science. It should have more features for data scientists to work with."
"Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's."
"Databricks could improve in some of its functionality."
"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing."
"Databricks' technical support takes a while to respond and could be improved."
"The solution could improve by providing better automation capabilities. For example, working together with more of a DevOps approach, such as continuous integration."
"The connectivity with various BI tools could be improved, specifically the performance and real time integration."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"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."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while IBM Cognos is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Dremio, whereas IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion.
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