We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Windward Core based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"One of the features that we have found most important is that the report builder is in Word, so it was very easy to get into it... We could also use some of our existing Word templates."
"The most valuable features are the ability for it to be integrated into our software solution and the AutoTag tool that allows us to quite quickly create and update the templates themselves."
"The engine being able to sit inside of our firewall is the most important feature."
"Managing templates through MS Word, as non technical users can manage output."
"The quality of the layouts and designs is second to none. Windward's ability to help us generate templates, for which we can actually tag documents, is the key feature that we use."
"The usually the response is within one hour. The technical support will WebEx with you. I rate them as a 10 out of 10."
"Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain."
"It has the ability to easily integrate into existing apps with little code. If you know how to use MS Office, you can create a report."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"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."
"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 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 some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."
"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements. Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in."
"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."
"The tool does not support macOS documents."
Earn 20 points
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Windward Core is ranked 24th in Reporting. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. 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 Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Windward Core is most compared with Docmosis, SAP Crystal Reports, Nintex Document Generation, OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting and CA Easytrieve Report Generator.
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