We performed a comparison between Birst and IBM Cognos based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"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."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"It is a stable product."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"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."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"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."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
Earn 20 points
Birst is ranked 32nd in Reporting while IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews. Birst is rated 7.4, while IBM Cognos is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Birst writes "The dashboards and Visualizer are valuable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". Birst is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Alteryx and ThoughtSpot, whereas IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion.
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