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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
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
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

"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"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."
"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."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money."
"The user interface and dashboards are very good."
"The language support is very good."
"One of the good thing is that you can integrate different data source technologies. So you can model your environment without having any of our views running."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It enables us to configure various elements, such as dashboard settings, including factors like color schemes and other customization parameters."
"It is useful to use a tool like this to have a view of data at a point in time. You can extract and create little data sets that you can store, and then over time, you can have a view for tracking changes. Especially when you work with a relational database or a database that's a production database, the data is dynamic, but if you use QlikView, you can take a snapshot of different datasets. In your own time, you can then get insights and report, build, analyze, and draw whatever you need from the data, which is quite useful."
"QlikView is one of the strongest tools, I would say. Also, it has a very vast capability to process the data"
 

Cons

"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"It is a costly product; it is comparatively expensive."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"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."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Better source data connectors."
"Enhancing user-friendliness would be highly beneficial."
"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."
"The solution should be mobile-responsive. It should also include drag-and-drop and slice-and-dice features."
"The user interface is old."
"The user interface and ease of use takes a bit of a learning curve to pick up."
"For me, it is important to have a mix, what is the "view" and what is the "sense", Qlik Sense. They have two tools, but for me it is important to have only one tool, which combines the functions that we have from one side and the other side."
"Scalability really depends on the size of your data and QlikView server architecture. For the biggest data sets, it could become an issue at some point."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"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."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"The setup costs for QlikView are fair as are the yearly maintenance fees. The licensing becomes a bit more expensive and requires some planning for onboarding."
"It is not very expensive. I think it it is on par with other similar products on the market."
"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."
"The pricing is too high compared to the other solutions on the market."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."
"I rate QlikView's pricing a five out of ten."
"QlikView pricing and licensing is on the high side for a small sized company, but it's competitive among its peers."
"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."
report
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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
56%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
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.
816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.