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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
6.3
Number of Reviews
137
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Oracle Analytics Cloud1.2%
Other97.5%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Christine Wanjiru - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Project Manager at GlaxoSmithKline
Reporting workflows have become faster and data-driven decisions are made confidently
The best features IBM Cognos offers include seamless data integration, AI-powered insights, and user-friendly dashboards that really make my job easier. The AI-powered insights help me automatically identify patterns and insights where they enhance analysis depth effortlessly, and this feature has been very instrumental in uncovering variable insights that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. When it comes to seamless data integration, I love the seamless and efficient data integration capability of IBM Cognos Analytics, where it allows us easy merging of data from various sources such as customer feedback and sales figures. The smooth integration process streamlines workflow efficiency and enhances overall data management practice. I also really love the user-friendly and intuitive dashboards where IBM Cognos Analytics enables quick creation of custom dashboards and an easy understanding of visual data presentation, allowing us to identify trends at a glance and enhance our analytical capabilities. IBM Cognos has positively impacted my organization since implementing this tool, as it has been very helpful with a particularly strong data analysis capability that helps us in business planning. Its strong data analysis capability helps us for business planning, and the great reporting capacity helps update all the leadership management about the business in one report. Auto-scheduling and report generation is a good feature that saves a significant amount of time. Specific outcomes that show how IBM Cognos has helped my organization include saving time, as we have been able to save forty to fifty percent of our time with its auto-scheduling and report generation functionality.
Vaclav-Biba - PeerSpot reviewer
BI/DW Consultant at Neit Consulting
Enhanced analytics through metadata-driven reporting with enterprise-level visualizations enables competitive advantage
In my opinion, what can be better in Oracle Analytics Cloud these days is primarily about pricing. I am from the Czech Republic, which is our main market. The situation here in the Czech Republic is that Power BI rules the world. There are two main reasons for this. First, speaking about the Czech Republic specifically, and second, the Power BI pricing model appears cheaper compared to Oracle Analytics Cloud. 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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"The advanced calculations by the tool are highly effective"
"The best feature may be data flow, which is used to prepare and clean data."
"The product is easily customized."
"It's robust. It has the ability to handle massive amounts. After reporting has been developed, there is an ease of use or a user-friendly interface for a trained workforce."
"It's really an enterprise solution. It has a dashboard, like standard dashboarding functionality. It also has reporting capabilities for producing pixel-perfect reports, bursting large volumes of a document if you need to. It has interactive data discovery functionality, which you would use to explore your data, bring your own data, and merge it with maybe the data from an enterprise data warehouse to get new insights from the pre-existing data. It has machine learning embedded in the solution. If you're new to machine learning, it's a really good way to get into it, because it's all within this platform, and it's really easy to use."
"The ability to quickly search for and access relevant data is crucial."
"The scalability is acknowledged as pretty good, although my evaluation is limited because I used the tool for a short period."
"The technical support services are good."
 

Cons

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"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 high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"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."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"The product should be improved in terms of connectors; right now the top twenty connectors are available, but OneDrive and Teradata are missing."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud is lacking in charts. They should add more charts to it."
"As with most BI tools, the visualizations can be made much nicer. Currently, it has standard visualizations. They've been adding new visualizations, but we see animated visualizations from other vendors. It would be nice to have similar visualizations, such as the swarming visualizations, which are fairly new and very popular at the moment. I haven't seen that with Oracle. That would be nice."
"At this time, dataflows cannot be shared, but I think that this should be enhanced."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 pretty expensive."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"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."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"The product’s pricing is expensive. However, feature-wise, it fits the requirements of enterprise customers."
"The tool's pricing is not unreasonable or non-competitive."
"It is an expensive platform."
"The price is reasonable; it's quite a bit lower than Tableau and Spotfire."
"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"
"I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the value received for the price charge."
"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
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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
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Government
14%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise88
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
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?
Since IBM Cognos is a futuristic platform with many robust features, it takes time to grasp all the features and how they work, so there is a learning curve. The more I use this platform, the more ...
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?
The pricing of Oracle Analytics Cloud is quite expensive, fitting for a premium tool. However, the cost raises expectations for partner support that are not met, especially for smaller companies wh...
 

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: February 2026.
881,665 professionals have used our research since 2012.