Adaptive Insights vs IBM Cognos comparison

Workday and IBM are both solutions in the Reporting category. Workday is ranked #23, while IBM is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. Workday holds a 1.3% mindshare in RT, compared to IBM’s 3.3% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

2,069 Views
434 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Cognos

Read 136 IBM Cognos reviews

5,536 Views
2,104 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

IBM Cognos

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Adaptive Insights and IBM Cognos are competitive solutions in the financial planning and analytics sector. Adaptive Insights is favored for its ease of use and rapid deployment, while IBM Cognos is preferred for its comprehensive feature set and powerful data processing capabilities.

Features: Adaptive Insights offers ease of use, intuitive planning, and reporting tools for financial planning. IBM Cognos provides a broad range of analytics features, including advanced data visualization tools, making it suitable for organizations requiring extensive analytical capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Adaptive Insights could enhance its advanced analytics capabilities and data processing power. It can also work on providing more sophisticated data visualization options. IBM Cognos can improve by simplifying its user interface and reducing its complexity for new users. Additionally, the high cost can be a barrier, and streamlining deployment could be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Adaptive Insights offers a straightforward cloud-based deployment model with strong customer support, ideal for businesses needing a quick setup. IBM Cognos involves a more complex implementation process but provides detailed support options to ensure successful integration in data-heavy environments.

Pricing and ROI: Adaptive Insights generally has a lower setup cost, providing a quicker return on investment through simplified implementation and operational effectiveness. IBM Cognos, with higher initial costs, offers significant ROI for businesses that leverage its advanced analytical features over time.

To learn more, read our detailed Adaptive Insights vs. IBM Cognos Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. IBM Cognos

December 2025

Download the complete report

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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

Adaptive Insights

Ranking in Reporting

23rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (10th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (5th), Data Visualization (23rd), ESG Reporting Software (12th)

IBM Cognos

Ranking in Reporting

5th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

136

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 1.3%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.3%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM Cognos	3.3%
Adaptive Insights	1.3%
Other	95.4%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight

Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

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reviewer2648136

EDW Manager at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

Centralized reporting has supported university-wide regulatory dashboards and secure data access

From my experience, we use regular dashboarding with IBM Cognos for producing scheduled reports and for mandatory regulatory reporting. All our departments use IBM Cognos, with each department developing their own reports while our corporate IT team provides the data. Some people use the interactive dashboards feature of IBM Cognos, and there are also other tools in use. I think some users utilize Power BI and Tableau, but our IT organization only provides IBM Cognos as an enterprise business intelligence and reporting tool. IBM Cognos is evaluated and complies fully with all our security standards. In my opinion, IBM Cognos is very stable. It has been around for many years and many users are familiar with it, ensuring it performs well in its intended capacity. The benefits of choosing IBM Cognos, aside from cost savings, include having institutional knowledge for maintaining this infrastructure and a reliable solution that enhances developer productivity, given our team's extensive experience with IBM Cognos.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."

"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."

"Automated reporting."

"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."

"The biggest feature is the source of truth for all of our budget and forecast versions."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is its dashboard."

"It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday."

"It's very stable."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."

"In my opinion, IBM Cognos is very stable, and the benefits of choosing it, aside from cost savings, include having institutional knowledge for maintaining this infrastructure and a reliable solution that enhances developer productivity, given our team's extensive experience with IBM Cognos."

"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."

"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."

"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."

"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."

"The initial setup is quite straightforward."

More IBM Cognos pros

Cons

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."

"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."

"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"The product's configuration process could be faster."

"It's a Workday product; they could do a little bit better to integrate a pure-play integration with Workday, which really doesn't do that."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"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."

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

"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."

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."

"The solution seems to slow down the servers."

"The solution's support could be better."

"I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions."

"There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness."

More IBM Cognos cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."

"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."

"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"It's affordable."

"The solution is affordable."

"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."

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."

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

"It is pretty 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."

"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."

"It is averagely priced."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

14%

Insurance Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	87

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

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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.

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What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve. The more I use this platform, the more ...

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Comparisons

Infor dEPM vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 8% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 7% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 7% of the time

Planful vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 7% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 6% of the time

More Adaptive Insights Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 11% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 6% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 6% of the time

SQL Server vs IBM Cognos

Compared 4% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

January 2026

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

January 2026

Download IBM Cognos product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

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.”

IBM

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday

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.

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. IBM Cognos

December 2025

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