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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
10th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
141
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (5th)
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.4%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.4%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.4%
Oracle Analytics Cloud1.4%
Other97.2%
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

"The product is perfectly designed for smaller companies to multi-national companies."
"Metadata modeling is easy and efficient and reporting is generally quick while the online report studio generally works well."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"In France, we were surprised by the product, what it delivers, and what is included in the package."
"The product takes away the need for mundane reporting via Excel spreadsheets freeing up the business areas to concentrate on growing the business."
"IBM's support community is excellent, and there's a large knowledge base if we have any problems."
"You need the resources and the budget but it's a great set of tools that can bring value to your business."
"It has improved things in a lot of areas, such as in better decision making for the company."
"It's great for consolidation and creating one source of truth."
"The specific capability I find important in Oracle Analytics Cloud is that it allows the basic user to easily drag and drop data. I also like that the solution allows the user to decide what to measure and what to see in the reports."
"It's rather user-friendly."
"The dashboards, analytics, visualizations, and different reports are valuable for business analytics."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"The most valuable features of the solution are dashboarding and data visualization."
"Oracle Analytics DV is amazing as it's giving the power to the users without involving IT."
"Depending on the needs of business to business, but as far a visualizations are concerned, this is a good product."
 

Cons

"Data Manager, InfoSphere, and Framework manager can be a little more user-friendly."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved."
"Starting with Cognos wasn't easy before the most recent version 11, Cognos Analytics."
"The user interface in v10 is a little dated and not as tablet-friendly as some of the other viz tools."
"Data visualization could use improvement as many competitors offer more robust options for charts."
"Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"The product should improve its user interface. It should be welcoming and modern. Developers should also find it easier to build data models. Oracle Analytics Cloud needs to have better visualizations and more options in the marketplace."
"I looked at the predictive analytics feature in Oracle Analytics Cloud, but I used it very little because, everything considered, it does not add very much."
"The learning curve should be improved, and I'm uncertain if tutorials are readily available or easily accessible. We may have resorted to looking on YouTube for such information. Having easily understandable documents or guides for new users would be beneficial. AI integration would be an interesting feature to add in the next release."
"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."
"Sharing dataflows is not possible at this time, and the custom chart functionality is not available."
"The interfaces could be improved and some in-memory operations could be built into Oracle Analytics."
"Its FAW feature has limitations in terms of usage."
"It is expensive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"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."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"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 tool's pricing is not unreasonable or non-competitive."
"The price is reasonable; it's quite a bit lower than Tableau and Spotfire."
"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The product’s pricing is expensive. However, feature-wise, it fits the requirements of enterprise customers."
"Bottom line, the cost is really, really cheap compared to other solutions. Oracle has made a huge effort on the pricing."
"A highly cost-effective solution"
"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."
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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%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
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 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, ...
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 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...
What needs improvement with Oracle Analytics Cloud?
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...
 

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: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.