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IBM Cognos vs IBM Controller comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (12th), Reporting (6th)
IBM Controller
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (25th)
 

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 1.3%, down 2.2% compared to last year.
IBM Controller, on the other hand, focuses on Business Performance Management, holds 1.0% mindshare, up 0.7% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Microsoft Power BI7.1%
Tableau Enterprise5.8%
Other85.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Business Performance Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Controller1.0%
Anaplan5.8%
Workday Adaptive Planning5.6%
Other87.6%
Business Performance Management
 

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.
TL
Enterprise Architect at Veidekke
User support and consolidation capabilities have strengthened financial reporting
We primarily use IBM Controller for the consolidation of all our company results and yearly reporting IBM Controller appeals significantly to our user group led by the Chief Financial Officer and the team under them. The strong user support and capability in consolidation are standout features.…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product is perfectly designed for smaller companies to multi-national companies."
"The solution connects to all data sources easily."
"FM – though it lacks some of the previous version's features: dimensional and sorting."
"The most valuable features are activity reports and visualization."
"As a consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with a very wide range of clients with very specific needs, and so far, Cognos has not failed to meet their needs and surpass their expectations."
"Extremely fast solution using IBM Cognos Dynamic Cubes, with aggregate aware querying providing a fast-on-fast solution in combination with Netezza, while the interactive viewer and dashboards provide an unprecedented experience for key users with their data by enabling them to change visualizations on the fly and apply different sorts and filters for deeper analysis than is possible with a predefined application."
"If you need enterprise grade reporting, Cognos is a very economical solution for organizations."
"You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule."
"IBM Controller appeals significantly to our user group led by the Chief Financial Officer and the team under them."
"The strong user support and capability in consolidation are standout features."
 

Cons

"The reporting output/UI is quite old-fashioned."
"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."
"I've encountered issues where calculation runs took upwards of six hours because of data storage and build issues."
"Too many questions were answered with “upgrading to 10.2.2 will solve the problem”. This seemed to be IBM’s knee jerk reaction to uncommon, but known issues."
"Technical Support is very expensive and internet resources for many issues are very poor, similar to QlikView and Pentaho."
"Your models can get corrupted for numerous reasons; that's why it is always good to back up and save your work."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"There is room for improvement in the user interface, which might simply be a learning curve issue."
"I am uncertain about the delivery model of IBM Controller and the direction it is headed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is averagely priced."
"It is pretty expensive."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"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."
Information not available
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
13%
Insurance Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
No data available
 

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 IBM Controller?
I haven't provided a definitive opinion on pricing. However, knowing our CFO's cost-conscious nature, the pricing is likely very competitive and has never been an issue.
What needs improvement with IBM Controller?
I am uncertain about the delivery model of IBM Controller and the direction it is headed. While the delivery model includes both cloud and on-premises options, it causes confusion. A more straightf...
What is your primary use case for IBM Controller?
We primarily use IBM Controller for the consolidation of all our company results and yearly reporting.
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

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.
California Franchise Tax Board, Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., Kelsey-Seybold Clinic, Mirle Automation Corp., Radware
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.