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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Hyperion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th), Reporting (4th)
Oracle Hyperion
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
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 3.7%, down 4.2% compared to last year.
Oracle Hyperion, on the other hand, focuses on Business Performance Management, holds 12.7% mindshare, down 13.0% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Mahdi Mohaddes - PeerSpot reviewer
Good tool for data visualization but interface is not very intuitive
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 certainly supports streamlining across our global operations. The integration of Hyperion into our existing system improved operational efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"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."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"It's very easy to use and the functionality is quite complete."
"This solution provides a more structured methodology for doing analysis than a tool like Excel. It creates a central database that keeps all information in one place."
"Oracle Hyperion has helped make things work faster in our company."
"Oracle Hyperion is fairly user-friendly and not too complicated. The forecasting, it's really good. It's sometimes slow when there are a lot of users using it and we can have up to approximately 300 users using it. However, you can do it in Excel because there's an Excel add-in. This is a benefit because a lot of people do this way instead of having to go into the planning application itself."
"It is easy to use. It is very intuitive. Even though there is a lot of functionality that comes out of the box, you can customize the solutions to meet your needs. You have the ability to have business rules that produce all kinds of calculations. We're international, and we do all our FX conversions through that."
"The tool's most valuable feature of the solution is flexibility and integration capabilities."
"We can collect data from various sources, which is very useful for budgeting and planning."
"We have found there is excellent stability with Oracle Hyperion."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"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."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"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 Hyperion's scalability could be improved."
"I have a problem with Hyperion when I need to log some changes in the budget. It's hard to know who made which changes in the budget."
"The analytical side of the product could be better and needs to be improved."
"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."
"All the planning systems out there are great. It doesn't matter which company you use. They're all great. I've seen demonstrations on a number of them, but it all boils down to the culture within the organization itself to use that functionality, understand it, and help drive it. I've had Oracle salespeople do demonstrations, and it looked really good. We get it on board, and everybody still sticks to their Excel spreadsheets because companies are a lot more complex than what you could deliver on the planning system. So, there should be more education on the capabilities, and there should be more understanding of organizations in terms of the way they access the data in order to plan."
"The initial setup of Oracle Hyperion is very difficult."
"The interface could be better. It could be more user-friendly, it is not very intuitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"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."
"It is pretty 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."
"The licenses cost approximately $1,000."
"The licensing cost for the on-premises version of the solution is too high."
"To get a full license, which gives you access to most of the different Hyperion programs, it costs $2000 to $2500 a month."
"It might be considered relatively costly compared to some alternatives."
"The solution is affordable."
"We pay for licensing yearly."
"As Oracle's pricing is on the higher end, most businesses prefer to have their own private cloud."
"Compared with MSBA, it is quite reasonable."
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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
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
6%
 

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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