IBM Cognos vs ThoughtSpot comparison

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IBM Cognos

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

IBM Cognos and ThoughtSpot compete in the realm of business intelligence and data analytics. ThoughtSpot appears to have the upper hand due to its user-friendly, search-driven capabilities that simplify data exploration without requiring extensive technical skills.

Features: IBM Cognos offers comprehensive analytics and reporting tools with strong scheduling, integration capabilities, diverse report formats, and robust security. It provides powerful ad-hoc query capabilities and reporting flexibility. ThoughtSpot is known for its intuitive search-driven analytics that allow users to query data using natural language, simplifying data exploration and offering quick insights. It is favored for its ease of use and setup, ideal for self-service analytics by business users.

Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos could improve by enhancing its ease of use, updating its visualizations, and improving integration with modern data sources. ThoughtSpot would benefit from expanded visualization options, improved support for diverse data sources, and increased customization flexibility. Furthermore, ThoughtSpot should refine its data connectivity to reduce redundancy and improve stability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos is available for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud deployments but often requires assistance due to its complexity, with some users finding its customer support expensive and slow. ThoughtSpot offers flexible deployment across private and public clouds, with users finding its customer support helpful and personalized.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos has a complex and costly pricing model, especially for larger user bases, though it can offer substantial ROI through detailed insights. ThoughtSpot's pricing is more flexible, based on data usage rather than user count, which can benefit companies with varying data needs, particularly medium-sized enterprises focusing on specific data-driven decisions.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cognos vs. ThoughtSpot Report (Updated: January 2025).

IBM Cognos vs. ThoughtSpot

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

134

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (4th)

ThoughtSpot

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

19th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (14th), Embedded BI (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.7%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThoughtSpot is 1.5%, up from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

AMOL JAJU

Senior BI-ETL Consultant at CMA Consulting Services

Offers ad hoc analysis reports and good for operational dashboarding

There used to be many valuable features, but in the last three or four years, whatever IBM is doing with enhancements, it has taken a lot of time to build and develop. But the best usage of Cognos is the ad hoc analysis reports. I really like that. Our customers also like that. But now the usage of Cognos and OBIE is reduced by various business users because people and business users are now more focused on analytics, slice and dice, and the dashboard, and the widgets.

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Anthony Fiorino

SVP, Head of Enterprise Data Mgmt & Data Intelligence at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support

The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box. Of course, there's data modeling needed, and things like that, but I can throw it at a set, and I can get up and running in a matter of hours. If a new group comes to me and says, "Hey, I've heard about ThoughtSpot. I have some data and I want to be able to do some analytics, do some profiling, do some BI against it." In a couple of hours, I connect to their source and I just do it. Now for a production product, we have to model and perform it over time, but at least I can get people up and running extremely fast with a tool that's intuitive and easy to use.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."

"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."

"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."

"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."

"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."

"ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."

"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases."

"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."

"The initial setup was very straightforward."

"It is easy to set up the solution."

"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."

"The scalability is good."

Cons

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

"Need improvement towards Visualization."

"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."

"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."

"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."

"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."

"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."

"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."

More IBM Cognos cons

"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."

"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."

"The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot."

"In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do."

"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."

"The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases."

"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."

"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"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."

"Pricing should be improved."

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"I give the pricing a six out of ten."

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

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 ThoughtSpot?

It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?

I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It's better for me as I can control pricing a bit more easily.

What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?

We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to load or create our own custom calendar to actually need our fiscal year-end. With o...

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

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Microsoft Power BI vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 25% of the time

Tableau vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 23% of the time

Looker vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 11% of the time

Databricks vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Download IBM Cognos product report

IBM Cognos

January 2025

Download ThoughtSpot product report

December 2024

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

Learn More

IBM

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

ThoughtSpot is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows easy searching and drilling into data. Its ad hoc exploration and query-based search features are highly valued, and it is easy to set up, stable, and scalable.

The solution is used for reporting purposes, self-service BI, and embedding into other applications for customers to do self-service analytics. It helps businesses with metrics, KPIs, and important insights by sourcing data from various sources into one golden source and visualizing it in an easy way for the business to consume. The pricing model is ideal, charging for data rather than the number of users.

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.

Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs