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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
35
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
Jul 21, 2022
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
Jul 27, 2022
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

"All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo."
"The dashboarding itself was pretty easy. So both the front and the back end were positive in this case."
"What makes me really fond of Domo is the ETL because it enables us to maximize a single platform for pulling reports and automating things. We can send the raw data from a third-party platform and do the rest of the ETL in Domo, including transforming data, adding columns, etc."
"I mostly see it as an ETL which has many system connectors. It does a good job of ETL."
"We find the ease of using the solution valuable."
"The data certification feature, where the admin user can put a certified stamp on a data source so that other users can know that that is the correct and accurate data flow or data source to use, is a good feature."
"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."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"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."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
 

Cons

"The ETL way of storing is not up to mark. You have to rely on the naming convention that you're using in Domo because there are no folder systems where you can collate all your workflows and put them into separate folders. A folder system should be there so you can easily identify how you are working. Once you want to make some changes to your ETL, then you can see the whole lineage, identifying what is there and not there."
"In terms of the analytics, there is quite a limited set of options when using Domo. Whereas with Tableau we can perform heavy statistical computations, Domo doesn't have that capability. Domo is quite limited on that side."
"I would like to see more dashboard creation options."
"Their STK is not up to date and you can't access it on their website. They have a private STK to access resources in Domo."
"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."
"It is very difficult too, if we do have specific requests or errors that we can't get figure out - especially when it comes to the development platform, developing custom connectors or doing any kind of API work, custom cards - in that there's a lag in the response time."
"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."
"I would also like to see improvements to their drag and drop Magic ETL tool. You can drag and drop your ETL tool, but it doesn't really work for a large amount of data. It struggles with that. In a real-world application, where you're working with 30 million rows or 100 million rows, it takes a bit longer to process the data. If you do it in the Redshift ETL tool, using your own code, it's much faster."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"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 flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"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."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"It could have more options for themes."
"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."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Domo is slightly costly but it's much cheaper than some."
"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"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."
"I'm not sure about pricing, but I believe Domo is quite costly. Prior to joining this organization, I had a Domo license with my former employer and I think that license was around $500 to $600 annually. That was for a single license. I think it varies, depending on the organization that is acquiring Domo."
"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."
"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."
"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."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"It is averagely priced."
"It is pretty expensive."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"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."
"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
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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
9%
University
9%
Retailer
7%
Educational Organization
57%
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: October 2024.
814,572 professionals have used our research since 2012.