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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Hyperion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th), Reporting (4th)
Oracle Hyperion
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (2nd)
 

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.
Oracle Hyperion, on the other hand, focuses on Business Performance Management, holds 12.5% mindshare, down 12.7% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Mahdi Mohaddes - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 17, 2024
Good tool for data visualization but interface is not very intuitive
We use the forecast option, scenario modeling, and budgeting I am the one that builds the reports. So, it's the baseline for making any predictions for budgets and something like that.  We are an international organization, so it helps us to have consolidated reports and a clearer overview. It…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"It's very easy to use and the functionality is quite complete."
"Hyperion is helpful for all our budget processes."
"The roll-up potential of the product is very good, meaning we have detailed information and we want it to be summarized, based on geography, based on different product lines, or based on different charts of accounts in the general ledger. It rolls up the information in a very concise way. This makes it easy to understand the overall performance, for it's forecasting aspects, or quarterly reporting, year to year, or month to month reporting."
"We can integrate with any system and pull data from SAP or SQL Server. We can also design our own role files to establish how we pull the file data and store it in our database."
"We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning."
"The latest cloud version is more efficient for financial implementations."
"Functionality-wise, it is what they say it is. It is the best in class, but it all ties back to your users. If your users are completely enamored with Excel spreadsheets, then breaking those habits is hard."
"Oracle Hyperion is an advanced analytical calculation engine that can handle aggregation."
 

Cons

"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"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."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"There can be an improvement in many regards with the dimensions, the metadata, the interfaces, as well as the integration."
"From a technical perspective, the technical support could be improved and the price could be reduced."
"The initial setup of Oracle Hyperion is very difficult."
"They could support machine learning algorithms for the product."
"What I like is to have everything on one platform and not in different modules like Oracle Hyperion."
"I would like to see more integrations with third-party vendors such as BigSense and SAP. I'm looking forward to seeing more interface-related content."
"Oracle EPM Cloud solutions have simplified the security model. Nevertheless, it would be better having a more differentiated security model."
"The solution is about to cease to exist, so it doesn't really matter if they add anything to it. It's at end-of-life."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"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."
"It is pretty expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"To get a full license, which gives you access to most of the different Hyperion programs, it costs $2000 to $2500 a month."
"The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high."
"The solution is affordable."
"It might be considered relatively costly compared to some alternatives."
"As Oracle's pricing is on the higher end, most businesses prefer to have their own private cloud."
"Oracle Hyperion's licensing structures are quite expensive for some companies, especially medium-sized companies because of the user-based license."
"We pay for licensing yearly."
"The licenses cost approximately $1,000."
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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
Educational Organization
57%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Retailer
5%
 

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...
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...
What do you like most about Oracle Hyperion?
We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning.
What needs improvement with Oracle Hyperion?
The most important aspect for improvement is the time efficiency when handling large databases. When the database consists of several million records, the software can be slow. However, the perform...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Hyperion?
We use Oracle Hyperion for ad hoc querying and connection with multidimensional databases. It is very easy to use for combining dimensions of the database such as time, geography, and product dimen...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Hyperion
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

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.
ITNL, Aditya Birla Nuvo Ltd., Zaklady Farmaceutyczne Polpharma S.A., Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd., Barco N.V., SITA, McGregor Fashion Group B.V., PCCW Ltd.
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