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, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"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."
"It is a stable product."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."
"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."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"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."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"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."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
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, Oracle Hyperion and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, whereas Oracle Essbase is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics and Databricks.
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