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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Analytics Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (3rd)
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.2%, down from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Oracle Analytics Cloud1.2%
Other97.5%
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.
DavidMalizia - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Data And Ai at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Data projects have grown rapidly and support complex analytics and quick dashboard delivery
Some things that could be improved in Oracle Analytics Cloud is definitely the way it works. In some cases, for example, if you want to create analytic functions such as the percentage of a measure over another, which is a straightforward question you might ask, it appears simple to do, but the result is not what you expect. I would make it more user-friendly in terms of creating new measures. The measure creation feature could be improved. In terms of functionality, there are not many functions that are completely missing. There is one aspect that if you compare it with Power BI from Microsoft, which works completely in memory and therefore puts everything in memory to allow many calculations on the fly on what is in memory, that is missing, but it is architecturally different and would not be possible to ask for something like that. Some time features and time series analysis functions could be improved. Calculating a year ago and previous period functions could definitely work with some improvement.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"The technical support is excellent, and they respond quickly."
"It's valuable feature is that it is user-friendly and doesn't require much time for understanding. The solution is stable. The initial setup was straightforward."
"The product is easily customized."
"It has the best feature for data augmentation."
"Data preparation is fantastic and fast. We were able to use multiple data sources and prepare the data quickly."
"A valuable feature is the speed of the solution."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
 

Cons

"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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 flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"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."
"Sharing dataflows is not possible at this time, and the custom chart functionality is not available."
"It should simplify data connectivity and modeling, making data extraction more streamlined and adaptable for diverse use cases."
"One of the major issues is that Oracle Analytics Cloud is not user-friendly, requiring skilled people with proper certifications to work with it successfully."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"The pricing model in Microsoft is more straightforward. With Oracle, you have the data visualization and enterprise lines, and to put it simply, both appear as more expensive options for customers trying to get oriented in the segment."
"At this time, dataflows cannot be shared, but I think that this should be enhanced."
"The pricing model in Microsoft is more straightforward. With Oracle, you have the data visualization and enterprise lines, and to put it simply, both appear as more expensive options for customers trying to get oriented in the segment."
 

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."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"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."
"It is averagely priced."
"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."
"The solution is affordable."
"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"We pay on a monthly basis and it is $10 per user each month."
"The product’s pricing is expensive. However, feature-wise, it fits the requirements of enterprise customers."
"I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the value received for the price charge."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's pricing is generally higher than that of other vendors."
"I don't know the exact cost, but its pricing was good. Its pricing was competitive. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing."
"A highly cost-effective solution"
"It is an expensive platform."
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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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise90
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise11
 

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?
One area where IBM Cognos can be improved is that customer service sometimes is not very responsive, and I would love to see the user interface improved, especially to look somehow updated. In addi...
Which Oracle product is better - OBIEE or Analytics Cloud?
Oracle OBIEE is designed to be relatively easy to set up and has a helpful customer support staff at the ready to assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What do you like most about Oracle Analytics Cloud?
The ability to quickly search for and access relevant data is crucial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Analytics Cloud?
Pricing for Oracle Analytics Cloud works with how much you want it to cost. We have clients who have bought large amounts of Oracle and the price per product has gone down massively because they bo...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Oracle Analytics Cloud Service, OAC, Oracle Data Visualization, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service, ODV
 

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.
Sejong Hospital
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Oracle Analytics Cloud and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,797 professionals have used our research since 2012.