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Birst vs QlikView comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th)
Birst
Ranking in Reporting
32nd
Average Rating
7.4
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (14th)
QlikView
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 4.6%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Birst is 0.2%, down from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 3.3%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

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.
RH
The dashboards and Visualizer are valuable.
The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated. By “clunky” I mean that it sometimes becomes confused and throw an error when I’m making a change. To clear it up, I will have to log out and log back in. We knew going into our purchase that the UI for the admin was not the strongest part of Birst at the moment. Power users often depend on the web services to complete admin tasks and the web services are robust. Birst knows they need to improve this area of their system and have been working on that. They began improving usability overall with the the front-end UI that report writers utilize and did an excellent job with that so I have good reason to expect the admin module UI refresh to be solid as well. From what I understand, the planned changes are more significant than a simple UI refresh also.
Arjun Meda - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for data visualization and business intelligence
Many of the features in Qlik Sense need to be available and reintroduced in QlikView. I believe many of the features have been added to QlikView after the layout containers were introduced. QlikView used to be a way more customizable tool than Qlik Sense is in the present time. Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times. Hiding off the apps in the app overview tab based on the access was a really good feature that needs to be introduced back in the product since I see that, at the moment, there are multiple groups on the tool, owing to which multiple changes on the QMC part is required to handle the solution. Only the person with access to the dashboard in QlikView could have a link to the dashboard through QlikView's hub or access points. With Qlik Sense, one can see whatever is available in the stream. If a user wants to control everything in the product, then there is no need to make multiple changes in the QMC at the individual app level. The aforementioned area can be considered to improve Qlik Sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau."
"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."
"It has user-friendly data visualization features, supporting our decision-making process with its business intelligence capabilities"
"A well designed app brings freedom of inquiry to meetings, allowing me to answer questions in real time and this has transformed progress and outputs of our monthly group meeting."
"The scalability is there."
"The in-memory feature gives us better insight. It's also easy to drill down into the information and select information."
"Its ability to build, very quickly, very complicated models."
"The most valuable feature of QlikView is the integration with other third-party tools."
"It excels in supporting database connections and various database types."
"On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL."
 

Cons

"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."
"The pricing is high."
"QlikView is probably on the pricier side than other BI tools."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of a feature that would allow us to add a common library of (our) commands used in load scripts and expressions, so with a keyword, we would get a drop down to select the command we are looking for, as opposed to the generic help."
"The user interface and ease of use takes a bit of a learning curve to pick up."
"It needs work with visualization."
"There is a lack of static PDF report generation and automatic resizing of the dashboard to fit the device."
"They should offer the capability to directly access data from SaaS environments, as it would simplify the migration process, and while it may seem like a minor enhancement, it would be beneficial to our clients."
"I would like to see more advanced features from Qlik Sense integrated into QlikView to keep it competitive and up-to-date."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"It is averagely priced."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"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."
"It is pretty expensive."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
"Pricing is a bit too high and I think licenses should be unlimited."
"The pricing is moderate, in the medium price range."
"QlikView is more expensive than one of its competitors."
"It's reasonably priced and falls on the more affordable side."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."
"QlikView is a reasonably priced solution."
"The pricing is too high compared to the other solutions on the market."
"Its licensing costs are moderate, but it can get expensive due to the numerous add-ons available like those for printing."
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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
Educational Organization
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Government
4%
No data available
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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 version...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about QlikView?
If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?
Qlik Sense's licensing metrics are flexible. They provide packages based on needs, like named licenses, developer lic...
What needs improvement with QlikView?
QlikView lacks self-service capabilities, which means users depend on the IT team to make changes. Qlik Sense offers ...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. QlikView and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
824,067 professionals have used our research since 2012.