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IBM Cognos vs SAS Visual Analytics 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.9
IBM Cognos enhances decision-making and efficiency, offering savings, improved collaboration, and data-driven insights with automation and tailored reports.
Sentiment score
6.0
SAS Visual Analytics offers efficient analytics and revenue generation, though costs and ROI vary due to operational components.
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
This demonstrates that it requires a lesser number of people. You do not need a huge team for maintaining or working with IBM Cognos.
Sr cloud engineer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
The enterprise subscription offers more benefits, ensuring valuable outcomes.
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
I have seen a return on investment with SAS Visual Analytics, as it includes AI capabilities and automatic functions with scheduling, allowing reports to be made from live data, which contributes to a new vertical for revenue generation.
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.4
IBM Cognos support experiences are mixed, with praise for expertise but concerns over response times and documentation quality.
Sentiment score
6.6
Customer service experiences for SAS Visual Analytics vary widely, with strong technical support but mixed business query satisfaction levels.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Customer support for IBM Cognos is very responsive.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
They provide callbacks to ensure clarity and resolution of any queries.
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
They assist us when we encounter issues and provide help while we complete tasks.
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
IBM Cognos is praised for scalability, efficiently managing growth and balancing workloads, despite configuration and hardware challenges.
Sentiment score
7.6
SAS Visual Analytics excels in scalability and handling data, though high costs and resource needs are noted.
IBM Cognos displays good scalability, as it handles increased data growth well.
Data Analyst at Aig Foundation
It works across small teams to enterprise-level deployment.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
SAS Visual Analytics scalability is very good and positive.
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
IBM Cognos is highly stable, with occasional minor issues, and users report excellent reliability with regular updates and maintenance.
Sentiment score
7.2
SAS Visual Analytics is generally stable, though performance can vary with data volume, hardware, and user expertise.
IBM Cognos is stable and very flexible.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
Senior Project Manager at BD
SAS Visual Analytics is stable and manages data effectively without crashing.
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
 

Room For Improvement

IBM Cognos needs improvements in visualization, interface, data connectivity, integration, stability, support, and mobile user experience to compete.
SAS Visual Analytics struggles with performance, integration, user-friendliness, high costs, and lacks robust API, visualization, and support resources.
I would also suggest enhanced predictive analytics to move from more reactive to proactive decision-making.
Quality Engineering Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
Senior Project Manager at BD
IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
Training on SAS Visual Analytics is required to help overcome these issues.
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI.
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
 

Setup Cost

IBM Cognos is costly but feature-rich; negotiate discounts or bundled licenses for better pricing.
SAS Visual Analytics is costly, deterring smaller companies, with licenses and additional costs potentially exceeding $114,000 annually.
Our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
head of commercial at Assimil8 Ltd.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
Senior Project Manager at BD
 

Valuable Features

IBM Cognos excels in enterprise reporting, dashboard creation, and scalability, offering AI-driven insights and user-friendly features for data management.
SAS Visual Analytics offers a user-friendly interface with no-code features, enabling intuitive insights through advanced visualization and AI integration.
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech
Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis.
Senior Project Manager at BD
Our dedicated cybersecurity team ensures that sensitive data does not become public, making it crucial that data stored in IBM Cognos remains secure throughout the entire data cycle, which is where these enterprise-grade security measures prove invaluable.
Quality Engineering Lead at a logistics company with 51-200 employees
After implementing SAS Visual Analytics, we have generated a new way to generate revenue by providing live data visuals to our clients and making our team aware of data in real time, which has had a significant positive impact.
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
The ability to query information from our Excel data into SAS to view specific data is invaluable.
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (10th), Reporting (5th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (15th)
 

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 1.4%, down 3.3% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 3.9% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Microsoft Power BI7.5%
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Other85.3%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.6%
Tableau Enterprise9.7%
Qlik Sense4.8%
Other83.9%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

RL
Senior Project Manager at BD
Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.
Namanjbaraiya Baru - PeerSpot reviewer
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
Interactive dashboards have transformed clinical reporting and now support real time decisions
The best features of SAS Visual Analytics include performing data manipulation. I would characterize this as making data ready, transforming data, and making new variables through code while utilizing low-code and no-code facilities. In my experience, low-code features in SAS Visual Analytics help when I need to create a new variable. For instance, I can extract a date through the data roll step, and with no-code features, I can perform report creation by simply using drag and drop functionality. After implementing SAS Visual Analytics, we have generated a new way to generate revenue by providing live data visuals to our clients and making our team aware of data in real time, which has had a significant positive impact.
report
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise19
 

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 needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Regarding improvements for IBM Cognos, I think nothing yet about functionality, but I find the costs to be quite high for the enterprise system. However, since we need it, we continue to renew our ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos at my place of work is primarily for business intelligence (BI), mostly for serving, and we appreciate it because it covers the full BI stack, including dashboards, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
What is your primary use case for SAS Visual Analytics?
I started to work with SAS Visual Analytics ( /products/sas-visual-analytics-reviews ) in 2015. We use it for analysis on ICT expenditure information and ICT personnel information. The analytics ar...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
SAS BI
 

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.
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.