We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and IBM Planning Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."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."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"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."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"It's a very stable, robust product."
"The tool is flexible."
"All the different platforms are well integrated."
"IBM Planning Analytics is easy to use and deploy. It is quick to develop. The calculation machine is also very fast."
"The flexibility of IBM Planning Analytics is a great feature of this solution. The design flexibility with data rules and defining calculations The ability to combine online and offline calculations are a benefit. Additionally, the forecasting features and predictive analytics is very good."
"Planning Analytics' best features include automatic updates and slicing."
"A lot of the platform is in-memory, so Planning Analytics can run calculations quite fast. It also offers several user interfaces. And in the newest version of Planning Analytics, there is a new one called the Planning Analytics Workspace. Maybe it could be useful for the business side."
"The ease of use is valuable. The fact that it's plugged into Excel spreadsheets is also valuable. It provides additional functionality where you can slice and dice the information in a way that you can't do with spreadsheets"
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"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."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"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 solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement."
"The new frontend Planning Analytics Workspace is not very good, it could be improved. I like the Planning Analytics functionality but it would be helpful if it could be more customizable. You can create a prediction and receive information but you cannot do feature engineering regarding the predictive models. If this was added it would be helpful."
"It's wonky, and not super user-friendly with Excel."
"It would have been better if the solution was not just a tool kit."
"The tool should include features for prediction. It can also improve the scalability."
"The tool's transport layer could be improved when promoting development between environments."
"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It is a bit expensive, but it does the job."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while IBM Planning Analytics is ranked 5th in Business Performance Management with 22 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while IBM Planning Analytics is rated 8.6. 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 IBM Planning Analytics writes "Can easily create dashboards and helps businesses improve forecasting accuracy". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SQL Server, whereas IBM Planning Analytics is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Anaplan, Jedox and Oracle Hyperion.
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