We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Oracle Essbase based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"The solution is scalable."
"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."
"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"It's a very powerful analytical engine with Essbase as the back end. We can analyze, transform, or utilize a big chunk of data for our calculations."
"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Oracle Essbase is ranked 10th in Database Development and Management with 12 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Oracle Essbase is rated 8.4. 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 Oracle Essbase writes " Handles a huge amount of data at a time and offers good processing speed". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Oracle Essbase is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud and Databricks.
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