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Databricks vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Databricks enabled significant cost reductions and efficiency improvements, leading to high user satisfaction and impressive ROI compared to other platforms.
Sentiment score
6.9
IBM Cognos enhances decision-making and efficiency, offering savings, improved collaboration, and data-driven insights with automation and tailored reports.
This reduction in both time and money resulted in real-time impact and significant cost savings.
Consultant at Nice Software Solutions
For a lot of different tasks, including machine learning, it is a nice solution.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
When it comes to big data processing, I prefer Databricks over other solutions.
Head CEO at bizmetric
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
This demonstrates that it requires a lesser number of people. You do not need a huge team for maintaining or working with IBM Cognos.
Sr cloud engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.0
Databricks support is generally responsive and proactive, though issues like language barriers and indirect support occasionally occur.
Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Cognos support experiences are mixed, with praise for expertise but concerns over response times and documentation quality.
Whenever we reach out, they respond promptly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
As of now, we are raising issues and they are providing solutions without any problems.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I would give Databricks customer support a rating of ten.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Customer support for IBM Cognos is very responsive.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Databricks is praised for easy scalability and handling large data volumes, despite some cost and technical setup concerns.
Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Cognos is praised for scalability, efficiently managing growth and balancing workloads, despite configuration and hardware challenges.
The sky's the limit with Databricks.
Governance And Engagement Lead
The patches have sometimes caused issues leading to our jobs being paused for about six hours.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Databricks is an easily scalable platform.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
IBM Cognos displays good scalability, as it handles increased data growth well.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
It works across small teams to enterprise-level deployment.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Databricks is stable and reliable, successfully handling large data volumes, with minor issues mostly self-resolving.
Sentiment score
7.3
IBM Cognos is highly stable, with occasional minor issues, and users report excellent reliability with regular updates and maintenance.
They release patches that sometimes break our code.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Although it is too early to definitively state the platform's stability, we have not encountered any issues so far.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
Databricks is definitely a very stable product and reliable.
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees
IBM Cognos is stable and very flexible.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Room For Improvement

Databricks requires improved visualization, integration, interface, documentation, pricing, connector capabilities, community resources, support, and automated features.
IBM Cognos needs improvements in visualization, interface, data connectivity, integration, stability, support, and mobile user experience to compete.
Adjusting features like worker nodes and node utilization during cluster creation could mitigate these failures.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We prefer using a small to mid-sized cluster for many jobs to keep costs low, but this sometimes doesn't support our operations properly.
Senior Data Engineer at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
We use MLflow for managing MLOps, however, further improvement would be beneficial, especially for large language models and related tools.
Solution Architect at Mercedes-Benz AG
I would also suggest enhanced predictive analytics to move from more reactive to proactive decision-making.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
Senior Project Manager at BD
IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
 

Setup Cost

Databricks provides a flexible, cost-effective cloud solution integrating with Azure and AWS, though premium features can raise costs.
IBM Cognos is costly but feature-rich; negotiate discounts or bundled licenses for better pricing.
It is not a cheap solution.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
I believe that in terms of credits for Databricks, we're spending between £15,000 and £20,000 a month.
Governance And Engagement Lead
My experience with pricing, implementation costs, and licensing is that it is very efficient and very fast.
Our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Valuable Features

Databricks excels in user-friendly, scalable data management, supporting diverse languages, with strong analytics and governance features in the cloud.
IBM Cognos excels in enterprise reporting, dashboard creation, and scalability, offering AI-driven insights and user-friendly features for data management.
Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed.
Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The platform allows us to leverage cloud advantages effectively, enhancing our AI and ML projects.
Data Platform Architect at KELLANOVA
The Unity Catalog is for data governance, and the Delta Lake is to build the lakehouse.
Data Engineer at CRAFT Tech
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech
Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Our dedicated cybersecurity team ensures that sensitive data does not become public, making it crucial that data stored in IBM Cognos remains secure throughout the entire data cycle, which is where these enterprise-grade security measures prove invaluable.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Databricks
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), Data Science Platforms (1st), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)
IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (10th), Reporting (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Databricks is designed for Cloud Data Warehouse and holds a mindshare of 9.7%, up 9.1% compared to last year.
IBM Cognos, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.4% mindshare, down 3.3% since last year.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks9.7%
Snowflake15.1%
Teradata8.8%
Other66.4%
Cloud Data Warehouse
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Microsoft Power BI7.5%
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Other85.3%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
RL
Senior Project Manager at BD
Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.
report
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...
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 needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
IBM Cognos can improve its error messages, as whenever something is wrong, it does not give us the proper error message, and we end up rebooting the entire software. Additionally, they can improve ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos is to generate reports for clients and maintain IBM Cognos. My company is a retail company that provides the best price solutions to clients, and we use client data ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
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 Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: June 2026.
899,645 professionals have used our research since 2012.