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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud 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 Planning and Budgeti...
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (3rd), Financial Performance and Strategy 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 4.3% compared to last year.
Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, on the other hand, focuses on Business Performance Management, holds 6.3% mindshare, down 9.3% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Prithwish Kumar Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
Budgeting scenarios and versions helps us migrate data, visualize data, and do variant reporting
The best thing about the tool is the budgeting scenarios and versions. It helps us migrate data, visualize data, and do variant reporting. There are approval processes that allow users to submit data, whether for budgeting or forecasting. When they submit, it goes up in the hierarchy for approval. If the data looks good to the manager, they can approve it. This is a very unique feature that we get. The approval process is a back-and-forth process; it doesn't get finalized in one go. Another feature is the business rules, where we can give users the flexibility to run calculations on demand. We can set runtime prompts for them, so they can run the calculation for whichever year or factors they want. They just need to know the value they want. Everything else can be set up by the admins. These are the flexibilities that we can give the user.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"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."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"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'."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"I value Oracle's flexibility and customization levels."
"They provide tools certified to work on-site, in the cloud, or in a hybrid scenario, and this flexibility is valuable for various business sizes."
"The most valuable feature is the data integration in Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud."
"The product has a direct plugin to Microsoft Excel."
"The most valuable features of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud are the many capabilities it provides."
"The workforce, the cube database, is the most valuable feature where you do planning for your headcounts."
"Once you do the budget in Oracle ERP, you can upload it, but it's easier to create and manage budgets in the Oracle budgeting tool itself. For example, if you have a shortfall in the budget, it's easier to manage that and the forms, too, especially if you also have Oracle Forms Management. You can get the forms from somewhere and then transform those forms into budget heads."
"Beneficial analysis and easy to do management adjustments."
 

Cons

"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"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."
"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."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"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."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud could improve. There are times when the forms are slow in saving and calculating."
"Some of the things in this product are just too cumbersome and we don't need them and they make it harder to do certain things, or certain things have to have more specific names or descriptions."
"OCI can predict changes in your infrastructure in advance so that customers aren't caught off guard. It would be nice if OCI could predict these changes and notify Administrators without the Administrators asking OCI to do it."
"For HR, the workforce planning out of the box is complicated. For most users, it's not easy, and it requires a learning curve. It's not very user-friendly. It can be improved."
"One potential improvement would be a more visual workflow, as the current method using a tax list is not as effective."
"The FR recording studio that is used to build reports is clunky and awful to use. This could be improved a lot. The solution does have problems and limitations."
"Oracle initially forced HFM users to migrate to FCCS, which was difficult because moving applications wasn't easy."
"There are some issues with block creation in the memory. Sometimes, when we run a calculation and a new intersection is hit during the calculation, the memory block doesn't get created, which doesn't give the correct result."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"It is averagely priced."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"It is expensive."
"The price of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is expensive. However, it solves a lot of issues at the company. Having a better price could make us think about using more cloud products for Oracle and increase usage."
"There is an annual subscription for this solution and it is priced high."
"The solution is free."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
 

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud?
While cloud pricing may initially appear more expensive due to the absence of infrastructure expenses, it is fair. There's no need for physical servers or infrastructure management. The licensing i...
What needs improvement with Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud?
Oracle made a mistake by forcing HFM users to transition to FCCS before the solution was mature enough. It caused many clients to opt for OneStream due to its similarity with HFM. FCCS initially la...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud?
I have implemented Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud in many industries, such as manufacturing, banks, construction, and health business. It's an amazing software. In the past, Oracle was the mai...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Oracle PBCS, Oracle Enterprise Business Planning
 

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.
Australian Finance Group Ltd., Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd., TBS Group, Delaware Life Insurance, Shelf Drilling Ltd., Abu Dhabi Department of Finance, Fugro Norway AS, Drake & Scull International PJSC (DSI), Racepoint Global, Edgewater Technology Inc., King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Communications Test Design Inc.
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