IBM Cognos and Birst compete in business intelligence and analytics. While both offer comprehensive analytics solutions, Birst's focus on data discovery and visualization gives it an edge.
Features: IBM Cognos offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowing detailed insights, integration with various data sources, and centralized data management. Birst provides advanced data visualization, seamless data connectivity, and smart data aggregation.
Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos could enhance its user interface for a more intuitive experience. Simplifying the setup process for non-technical users and improving real-time data updates could be beneficial. Birst could improve in offering more robust customer support, providing more detailed documentation, and enhancing customization options for reports.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos provides a structured deployment model with reliable customer service, ensuring smooth implementation. Birst offers a cloud-first approach for faster deployment and flexibility, making integration easier with quick adaptability.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos involves substantial setup costs, but yields high ROI through detailed analytics. Birst's competitive pricing and faster ROI, due to efficient data management, appeal to businesses seeking quick analytics benefits.
This demonstrates that it requires a lesser number of people. You do not need a huge team for maintaining or working with IBM Cognos.
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.
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.
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is fine.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
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.
IBM Cognos can improve its error messages, as whenever something is wrong, it does not give us the proper error message, and we end up rebooting the entire software.
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.
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.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
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.
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.
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.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| IBM Cognos | 3.0% |
| Birst | 0.9% |
| Other | 96.1% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 3 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 12 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 35 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 24 |
| Large Enterprise | 92 |
Birst Networked BI and Analytics eliminates information silos. Decentralized users can augment the enterprise data model virtually, as opposed to physically, without compromising data governance.
A unified semantic layer maintains common definitions and key metrics.
Birst’s two-tier architecture aligns back-end sources with line-of-business or local data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source into a unified semantic layer. Users are enabled with self-service analytics through executive dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.
Birst goes to market in two primary ways: as a direct sale, for enterprises using Birst on internal data to manage their business; and embedded, for companies who offer analytic products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products.
Birst’s is packaged in 3 available formats: Platform and per-user fee; by Department or Business Unit; by end-customer (for embedded scenarios).
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:
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.”
We monitor all Reporting reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
