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Domo vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Domo
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
7th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (29th), Business Performance Management (13th), Data Visualization (6th)
IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Domo is 8.1%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

James John Wilson - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust, powerful, and easy to use
There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two. However, they were particular. What I wanted to see was the ability to collapse when you group a set of rows, let's say when you group them by status or health, so you have your red projects grouped up top. I wanted to compress or collapse that group of red and then open the yellow projects and then the green projects. There were a bit more features in the tables than I wanted to see. They have a widget that you can use either in Microsoft PowerPoint to pull over data into your PowerPoints and refresh graphs or charts or metrics or tables. I would love to see that available in Google Slides. I used it successfully in PowerPoint; however, at one company, they were only using Google products, and so that widget didn't help with reporting in slides. Therefore, we had to do a bit more manual work for our quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews to produce our executive presentations. Sometimes the fonts were difficult to read if you're trying to put a lot of data in a table and show a lot of rows. Sometimes the fonts got too light, and you had to really play with it to try and figure out how to make it readable. One thing I had to do, and I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, was when I was running a meeting, I would have to go turn off the data jobs. If I was running a meeting and a lot of times people were scrambling in the background to do their updates even as the meeting was occurring, it would cause the page to render very slowly. It would sometimes pause or freeze. I found that if I went and turned off the status, the data update jobs that we're pulling data from Smartsheet, then the meetings would work more smoothly, and there were no interruptions or delays.
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

"The ETL tools they have in Redshift are pretty awesome... I can work in Redshift to get the data from AWS and work in Redshift, in Domo, to create Transforms and the data structure we need..."
"The dashboard is the most valuable feature and allows for customization to create and share reports."
"The best feature of Domo is that it's completely on the cloud. I also like that you can handle data end-to-end without having to depend on multiple tools. Another specific feature I like the most about Domo is Magic ETL because, through it, you can do all your expression, transformation, and loading activities very smoothly. The tool also follows the lineage concept, so you can understand what kind of transformations took place on a particular data set. You can find end-to-end data from the source until it has become the final output or the final data set. Whatever happened to a particular data set, you can understand it through the Domo lineage, and that isn't possible in most of the tools available in the market, but in Domo, that's available. The tool is also solid and because it's on the cloud, it uses multiple data engineering in the backend and multiple algorithms in the back, behind the scenes, resulting in a great performance. For example, if an end user such as the CEO or COO opens a report or the dashboard and it takes more than ten seconds, the end user won't be interested in looking at that report or dashboard, but Domo enables better performance and there's usually no performance issues from that tool."
"In general, Domo is very powerful and very easy to use, relatively speaking."
"The pipeline features and data ingestions in Domo are quite good."
"The ability to create custom connectors was useful because you never know, with customers, what platform they want to utilize or what data they have. It gave us a lot of flexibility in being able to bring data in from different places."
"In Workbench 5, they have come up with a very useful feature called Upsert. When you're pushing data into the data set, if the data is already available it will update the data, and if that the data is not there it will insert it. That is a beneficial feature that they introduced in the latest version."
"This solution allows us to change our performance metrics and tracks our goals in real-time."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
 

Cons

"I would like to see better data intake."
"When you're exporting a graph out of Domo — suppose it is in the form of a donut chart or it is in form of a stack — the data comes out in tabular format, not as a graph. When exporting the data, I would like them to create a tab for graphs and another tab with the data in tabular format."
"The preconfigured apps need to be more relevant to allow one, out of the box, to load data in order to use pre-set reports/views."
"It is expensive."
"Data integration is okay, but not the best."
"Domo or any other BI tool has room for improvement, in particular, in the calculations. User-guided material isn't available for calculations. The tool, though user-friendly, could also be more customizable, especially when you're building a dashboard. Data integration could also be improved in Domo because even if the tool connects to multiple data sources, some hiccups still arise and need to be addressed."
"It is expensive."
"It's quite slow. We are using about 2,000,000 rows of data. Creating certain reports takes almost a couple of minutes, which should not be the case."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"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."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe that the investment in Domo was worthwhile because it allowed for the organization to jump in quickly, with little training. There are different plans available based on the requirements."
"It started out at about $600 a seat. However, then as we started to grow, it scaled that down to about $330 or 3$50 a seat, if I'm not mistaken."
"I think it is reasonable."
"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"The pricing differs from customer to customer, depending on the package."
"The price that they offered was around $200 per user license. It was pretty cheap at that time compared to other companies. I think they have revamped their pricing structure since then."
"Because it's software as a service, it's more expensive on the face of it. But there are a lot of variables. I don't have to pay for servers or for infrastructure. I don't have to pay labor for my IT organization to set up or maintain the environment. I don't have to pay for them to upgrade the software, and test it, etc., because when it rolls out, it is transparent and seamless for us. But, because of that, it costs more, I imagine, than Sisense, or Yellowfin, or Power BI. A lot of those make it sound like they're inexpensive, but when you add in all the hidden costs and all of the overhead, it's probably comparable."
"Domo has more than one licensing model. You can choose between the yearly subscription and the per-user licensing model. The tool is flexible in terms of licensing. As for the cost, Domo is an end-to-end BI tool so its pricing is a little higher than other players in the market, for example, non end-to-end BI tools such as OBIEE and Tableau specific only for business intelligence and presenting data to the end users, unlike Domo which handles everything. You want to get Domo as an integration tool, an ETL tool, etc. As the tool is end-to-end, its cost is always going to be a little higher than other BI tools, but it's worth paying because you won't have to spend extra for other activities. After all, Domo can do those activities."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"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."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"Pricing should be improved."
"It is pretty expensive."
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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
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
9%
Retailer
8%
Educational Organization
56%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Domo?
All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Domo?
Domo can be crazy expensive. They have a lot of capabilities but depending on the pricing model you have, either they nickel-and-dime you for add-ons or charge you for each job execution under the...
What needs improvement with Domo?
If Domo had a Copilot feature, you could interact with the graphs and talk to the graphs and tables.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

corda
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Capco, SABMiller, Stance, eBay, Sage North America, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, Telus, The Cliffs, OGIO International Inc., and many more!
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 Domo vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.
816,192 professionals have used our research since 2012.