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Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon QuickSight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
3rd
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.1%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Anoop Jose - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature
Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking. Especially for root cause analysis, the ability to drill down from a high-level problem to its root is crucial. Aside from that, QuickSight is a good service.
Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department
I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Amazon QuickSight can provide insights from the available data. It supports various rule types. We get the options of machine learning and insights, which are not available in other intelligence tools. It is easier to use, more stable, and cheaper than other solutions."
"One of the most valuable features of Amazon QuickSight has been the speed at which visualizations can be created."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the user interface."
"Amazon QuickSight has introduced a new functionality called Q bar, which allows the user to do natural language queries and get additional insights using some built-in generative capabilities."
"A valuable feature of Amazon QuickSight is that it's a cloud-native service provided by AWS. As all platforms within my company run on AWS, that's the leverage of Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is also easy to use, and I find the native connectors from AWS valuable as well."
"The product is easy to learn."
"QuickSight makes it easy to provision, create, and publish dashboards."
"It works well with the AWS ecosystem."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
 

Cons

"There should be better connectors for different data sets."
"QuickSight needs to add more visuals similar to what Power BI offers."
"The cost of queries is very high."
"The number of features in the product is limited in comparison with the other tools in the market, like Power BI."
"Lacked connectivity with other third-party tools and data sources."
"You can't tell a data story as well in QuickSight as you can on others, especially in TIBCO Spotfire."
"One area is that integrating data from different sources into QuickSight can be a bit tricky, especially with Amazon Connect. To get data flowing, you need to use two additional services and configure them correctly."
"There could be an end-to-end pipeline for data cleaning as well as presenting it using different visualizations."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"The solution's support could be better."
"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."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is not affordable."
"I rate the price of Amazon QuickSight a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."
"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."
"It's affordable compared to other long-term contractor business tools available in the market."
"The product pricing is better than other vendors."
"Amazon QuickSight you subscribe and you use the service."
"It is simpler and cheaper than other solutions."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"Pricing should be improved."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Government
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?
The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?
QuickSight is considered cost-effective. As far as I know, QuickSight is cheaper compared to other solutions like Power BI.
What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?
QuickSight needs to add more visuals similar to what Power BI offers. I have noticed that many drill-down visuals and other visual options available in Power BI are missing in QuickSight.
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
What do you like most about IBM Cognos?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great f...
 

Also Known As

QuickSight
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com
More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon QuickSight vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.