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Domo vs IBM Cognos comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Domo
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (30th), Business Performance Management (13th), Data Visualization (7th)
IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Domo is 7.8%, up from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.7%, down from 4.2% 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.
AMOL JAJU - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ad hoc analysis reports and good for operational dashboarding
There used to be many valuable features, but in the last three or four years, whatever IBM is doing with enhancements, it has taken a lot of time to build and develop. But the best usage of Cognos is the ad hoc analysis reports. I really like that. Our customers also like that. But now the usage of Cognos and OBIE is reduced by various business users because people and business users are now more focused on analytics, slice and dice, and the dashboard, and the widgets.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"One feature which I have found to be very interesting is the Beast manager, where you can create calculated fields. They are shared in one common repository so someone else can use the same calculated fields; they don't have to rewrite or reinvent the APIs."
"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."
"The fact that you can add any data source is valuable. The entire data handling suite they have, all the apps, etc., is pretty amazing. One of the key things, not being a techie or a data-warehouse guy, is that you can connect data sources, and do all kinds of pretty amazing things."
"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."
"We have found securing data valuable because it allows us to provide information without identifying individuals."
"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..."
"We've worked with all the features of Domo. Among the most important are Pivot and Sumo Cards. We can use drill-down from the top-most level with a click, generating charts."
"Using the "cards" which function as preconfigured reports or views. I use many of them simultaneously on an organized page, with filters that allow me to see high-level information as well as subsets across the dataset, in a few clicks. Many Excel-challenged users love to use this product for its simplicity."
"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'."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"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."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
 

Cons

"Their organization or client service didn't always keep up... They took on more and more clients and the processes slowed down a little bit."
"It's too early for me to say that something needs improvement, but there are times when there have been some flexibility issues with Domo... Tableau has a window function which can be integrated into a calculated field. That is missing in Domo so you have to make changes to the data set using ETL or SQL."
"I would like to see more dashboard creation options."
"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."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"The forecasting feature, the regression features, and the Python libraries could all be improved. They're all in beta."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"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."
"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 better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"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."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."
"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."
"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."
"They've built an "app economy." Some of them are really expensive, so they're not for startups and smaller companies. They're more like enterprise tools. We couldn't afford some of them, because they were so crazy expensive. But if I was working for a bank, insurance company, or some bigger corporation then, for sure, you could justify those prices... It was silly expensive back then and it probably still is, or even more expensive."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"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 solution is affordable."
"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."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"Pricing should be improved."
"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."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
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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%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Educational Organization
56%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
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 needs improvement with Domo?
Dashboard settings in Domo are not much different from other platforms like Power BI. Data integration is okay, but not the best. Additionally, sometimes, if you want to revert data, Domo lacks fea...
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
 

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: January 2025.
831,997 professionals have used our research since 2012.