IBM Cognos vs IBM Planning Analytics comparison

The compared IBM Cognos and IBM Planning Analytics solutions aren't in the same category. IBM Cognos is ranked #7 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 3.8% mindshare in the category. IBM Planning Analytics is ranked #4 in BPM , with an average rating of 9.2, and holds a 9.6% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM Cognos users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of IBM Planning Analytics users who would recommend it.

IBM Cognos

Read 134 IBM Cognos reviews

7,680 Views
4,182 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

IBM Planning Analytics

Read 23 IBM Planning Analytics reviews

2,057 Views
1,289 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

IBM Cognos

IBM Planning Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and IBM Planning Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools.

To learn more, read our detailed BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

October 2024

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Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

134

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th), Reporting (4th)

IBM Planning Analytics

Average Rating

8.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (4th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Cognos is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 3.8%, down 4.4% compared to last year.
IBM Planning Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Business Performance Management, holds 9.6% mindshare, up 8.3% since last year.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Business Performance Management

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

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.

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Gnanavel-Chakkarapani

Junior Consultant at CMA CGM

Mar 22, 2024

Can easily create dashboards and helps businesses improve forecasting accuracy

The product has improved our company's forecasting accuracy since it serves as a very useful tool for our sales and controller teams as they easily get to enter the inputs using views in TM1, which gets loaded into our main database. If there are sales team members in different parts of the world, like in Hong Kong and Singapore, they may prefer to use IBM Planning Analytics, which is easy to use when compared to the Excel tool. Speaking about planning analytics and data analysis, I would say that our company used to use IBM Cognos Analytics for reporting, where we used to use Cognos Dynamic Cubes so that users can easily use its drag and drop features while getting to see the data for which the users had to wait for two to three minutes prior to its use. In our company, tons of data are loaded into the memory, and users can use Cognos Dynamic Cubes to analyze data and understand it. The AI capabilities of IBM have benefited our planning strategy as they are very useful for business. The tool allows the easy creation of dashboard reports using AI capabilities. No technical knowledge is required for business use cases. It is possible to integrate the product in scenarios where some new integrations are available. I remember that my company used Azure Data Factory to connect Azure, Oracle, and IBM WebSphere Application Server. When it comes to IBM Planning Analytics, it is complex to integrate it with LDAP and or any other authentication tool offered by Microsoft. In our company, some users like to integrate IBM Planning Analytics with the common LDAP or Microsoft AD, which we currently use for all our applications. The authentication part is difficult to configure with IBM Planning Analytics. The maintenance of the product is easy. My company has scheduled maintenance on the product every week, especially during forecast times, so that memories automatically lapse and users can freely access their servers. The use of the tool has had an impact on collaboration within our company's planning team since everyone knows how to easily access the data and publish the results. I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."

"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."

"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."

"It is a stable product."

"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The most valuable features of IBM Planning Analytics for streamlining planning processes include a unified database where all data are centralized."

"IBM Planning Analytics is easy to use and deploy. It is quick to develop. The calculation machine is also very fast."

"The scenario modeling capabilities are frequently used to create different scenarios, compare them, and see which action leads to which result."

"Navigating through the data to make analysis is really quick."

"The tool is flexible."

"The flexibility of IBM Planning Analytics is a great feature of this solution. The design flexibility with data rules and defining calculations The ability to combine online and offline calculations are a benefit. Additionally, the forecasting features and predictive analytics is very good."

"It's a very stable, robust product."

"Planning Analytics' best features include automatic updates and slicing."

More IBM Planning Analytics pros

Cons

"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."

"It is a costly product; it is comparatively expensive."

"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."

"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."

"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."

"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."

"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."

"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."

More IBM Cognos cons

"Extracting data is a little slow."

"The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement."

"The new frontend Planning Analytics Workspace is not very good, it could be improved. I like the Planning Analytics functionality but it would be helpful if it could be more customizable. You can create a prediction and receive information but you cannot do feature engineering regarding the predictive models. If this was added it would be helpful."

"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."

"Planning Analytics could be improved by adding automation features."

"It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality."

"The tool should include features for prediction. It can also improve the scalability."

"It is a bit expensive, but it does the job."

More IBM Planning Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."

"Pricing should be improved."

"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."

"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"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 pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."

"The solution is affordable."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"The license of this solution is paid annually. Most of my customers choose a license that includes support."

"IBM Planning Analytics is not the cheapest solution, but it's priced per the market standard for this type of solution. I rate the price at seven out of ten."

"I would rate the tool's pricing a nine out of ten since it's expensive."

"IBM Planning Analytics is priced well, and licensing costs are yearly."

"It is a bit expensive, but you get what you are paying for."

"Our licensing cost is approximately $50,000.00 per year."

"Compared with the other tools in the market, IBM Planning Analytics is a bit expensive."

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

57%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

46%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Planning Analytics?

The most valuable features of IBM Planning Analytics for streamlining planning processes include a unified database where all data are centralized.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Planning Analytics?

The cost of IBM Planning Analytics is not cheap, considering the amount of money involved. However, it offers good ROI for customers.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Planning Analytics?

The workspace API should be improved and documented so we know better which objects and tier-one objects are used.

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

Looker vs IBM Cognos

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Planning Analytics

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Planning Analytics

Compared 20% of the time

Anaplan vs IBM Planning Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Jedox vs IBM Planning Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Planning Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Planning Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

October 2024

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Buyer's Guide

IBM Planning Analytics

October 2024

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Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

Cognos TM1, IBM Cognos TM1

Learn More

IBM

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

IBM Planning Analytics is an integrated planning solution that uses AI to automate planning, budgeting, and forecasting and drive more intelligent workflows.

Built on TM1, IBM’s powerful calculation engine, this enterprise performance management tool allows you to transcend the limits of manual planning and become the Analytics Hero your business needs. Quickly and easily drive faster, more accurate plans for FP&A, sales, supply chain and beyond.

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.

ManpowerGroup, Convergys, AIG, Orchard Brands, Citibank, InterGen, Northwestern University, EF Education First, Ironside, Bazan Group, CSOB Insurance, Macquarie Group, Charles Stanley, SATO, Government of Sint Maarten, BMW Financial Services

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BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

October 2024

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