We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise 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."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"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."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The product does not have documented material."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Looker is rated 8.0. 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 Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and IBM Controller, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and Domo.
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