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IBM Cognos vs QlikView comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th)
QlikView
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 4.4%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of QlikView is 3.2%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

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.
Arjun Meda - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 4, 2024
Useful for data visualization and business intelligence
Many of the features in Qlik Sense need to be available and reintroduced in QlikView. I believe many of the features have been added to QlikView after the layout containers were introduced. QlikView used to be a way more customizable tool than Qlik Sense is in the present time. Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times. Hiding off the apps in the app overview tab based on the access was a really good feature that needs to be introduced back in the product since I see that, at the moment, there are multiple groups on the tool, owing to which multiple changes on the QMC part is required to handle the solution. Only the person with access to the dashboard in QlikView could have a link to the dashboard through QlikView's hub or access points. With Qlik Sense, one can see whatever is available in the stream. If a user wants to control everything in the product, then there is no need to make multiple changes in the QMC at the individual app level. The aforementioned area can be considered to improve Qlik Sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"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."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"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."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The initial setup is not very complex."
"It excels in supporting database connections and various database types."
"Its ability to build, very quickly, very complicated models."
"The most useful feature of QlikView for me is the QVD concept."
"QlikView is one of the strongest tools, I would say. Also, it has a very vast capability to process the data"
"The most valuable feature of QlikView is the integration with other third-party tools."
"It's incredibly fast and can handle large volumes of data without slowing down our operations."
"If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money."
 

Cons

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The pricing is high."
"It is really old. We are moving towards converting everything into a Power BI environment. We want to have a self-service type of BI environment where different levels of users in organizations can log onto a portal and retrieve the data they need or get the necessary insights for decision-making that's important for them or their business unit. They have built a new version of QlikView called QlikSense, which probably competes with newer BI tools, such as Power BI, but they are far behind. That's why we are moving towards a newer tool that's easier to use and has more visualizations to represent the data."
"There is a lack of static PDF report generation and automatic resizing of the dashboard to fit the device."
"They could provide a user-friendly analysis process rather than specialized IT resource code."
"There could be a feature to analyze the sales and accounting data of the client."
"It needs work with visualization."
"Improvement in collaboration, between that and publishing of reports and publishing of models."
"The product's visual capabilities could be improved. The graphs and visualizations are not as aesthetic or easy to create."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"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."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"I rate the product's pricing a three out of ten."
"My firm got the product at a cheap price, but in general, I believe that the product is a bit costly."
"The pricing is moderate, in the medium price range."
"It is expensive for small companies."
"It has an annual license. It is expensive as compared to other competitive tools that do more for less. In South African rands, we pay about 100,000 to 200,000 a year."
"It is quite expensive, rating at around nine out of ten on a cost scale."
"The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing."
"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."
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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
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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 QlikView?
If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?
QlikView is probably on the pricier side than other BI tools. It's more expensive than the overall implementation of Power BI and maybe about or a little less than Tableau. I do not have any specif...
What needs improvement with QlikView?
Creating an out-of-the-box solution for modeling capabilities might be beneficial.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

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.
Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. QlikView and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,572 professionals have used our research since 2012.