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."Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"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."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."
"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."
"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."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."
"The scalability is good."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"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."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."
"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."
"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."
"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."
"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."
"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 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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