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IBM Cognos vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
21st
Ranking in Reporting
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Operations Analytics (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.6%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
Sayan König - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2022
Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up
It's a data warehouse for finance and central bank reporting purposes, and an ETL tool in this environment It's easily understandable. The product is quick and flexible, with very good steps to make data transformation possible.  The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The repository should…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"It is a stable product."
"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 were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"The repository should be improved."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Logging capability is needed."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"Version control would be a good addition."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 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."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"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."
"It is pretty expensive."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Government
8%
 

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...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
The organization has both options based on their needs and budget constraints. The Enterprise Edition is expensive with references to an added number of features.
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
The product to me is not as user-friendly as other players in the market. It also still needs improvement in the reporting module. You will need to search for deployment examples or need to have a ...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
 

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.
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.