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IBM Cognos vs Kyvos 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Kyvos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
44th
Ranking in Reporting
50th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.4%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kyvos is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Kyvos0.5%
Other98.1%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
SN
Business Analyst at Barclays Capital
A stable solution that can be used for data discovery, but it should include more tutorials for new users
We use Kyvos for data discovery and drilling down to the exact data point The most valuable features of Kyvos are reconciliation and its ability to query big data. Since I couldn't find any tutorials or a handbook, I had some initial difficulty understanding the UI and the whole interface of…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Very powerful toolset with many products and options."
"There is a huge cost up front to purchase and get it off the ground, but once you have it, you won’t regret it."
"The most valuable features are activity reports and visualization."
"Cognos provides a multitude of reporting options and I love working with it."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to quickly build cubes with Cognos Transformer."
"The entire process can be created in the IBM tool from source, to reporting, to administration."
"If you are looking for an all integrated, scalable and high quality reporting tool, Cognos is a solution to consider."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The most valuable features of Kyvos are reconciliation and its ability to query big data."
 

Cons

"The Cognos Analysis Studio and Cognos Query Studio user interface has room for improvement in the area of user experience."
"Every product on the market can be improved, but I would like IBM to stop trying to compete with the smaller players in the market, rushing out versions that nobody wants to migrate to because the version seems unstable."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"Customer Service: It's poor. Technical Support: It's fair."
"Report authoring can be a bit overwhelming for new users, but the new version helps with this as well."
"There is room for improvement with the GUI. The product is a web-based application; it is easy to build basic style. However, at a certain level, it lacks support for advanced web programming capabilities, such as JavaScript, Ajax, etc."
"The stability of the lookups is not very good, and really needs improvement."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality."
"Since I couldn't find any tutorials or a handbook, I had some initial difficulty understanding the UI and the whole interface of Kyvos."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is pretty expensive."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"Pricing should be improved."
Information not available
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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%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
 

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, ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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.
Information Not Available
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