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IBM Cognos vs Oracle Analytics Cloud comparison

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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
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
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 (15th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.5%
Oracle Analytics Cloud1.5%
Other97.0%
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

"With Cognos Burst, we are able to provide personalised reporting and analytics for hundreds of recipients without manual work."
"If you have a complex problem and you want to distribute a lot of information about the users it is important to get the users to build good reports, then I think is the best tool in the market."
"IBM Cognos generates reports very fast and quickly."
"If you are looking for an all integrated, scalable and high quality reporting tool, Cognos is a solution to consider."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"It is a very complete solution: versatile, flexible, robust, and scalable."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The organization was able to reduce the reporting efforts by 50% and have more insightful reports."
"The technical support is excellent, and they respond quickly."
"The product is easily customized."
"We use Analytics because we have a model for it which can be easily customized, and implementation time can be reduced because of this."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"Oracle Analytics DV is amazing as it's giving the power to the users without involving IT."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's most valuable feature is its visualization."
"The AI/ML enablement is useful, as many reporting tools do not offer machine learning models as of now, without writing customized code."
"Data preparation is fantastic and fast. We were able to use multiple data sources and prepare the data quickly."
 

Cons

"Prompting should be better."
"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."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"Big data support came very late into Cognos and the product is too costly, I would say."
"Customer Service: 6/10 as they usually get back quickly but rarely have a solution."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"IBM Cognos could improve by introducing different role types, such as viewer roles, user roles, and admin roles, along with assigning minor modules to specific individuals."
"Performance and visualizations are aspects which need to be improved."
"As with most BI tools, the visualizations can be made much nicer."
"Enterprise customers shy away from purchasing Oracle Analytics Cloud and prefer competing solutions from Tableau and Microsoft."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"It is less scalable than Snowflake."
"The implementation of generative AI and machine learning should improve"
"When you implement the product on a small scale, it doesn't generate any ROI."
"They could improve the ease of developing the dashboard and interacting with it."
"The product should be improved in terms of connectors; right now the top twenty connectors are available, but OneDrive and Teradata are missing."
 

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."
"It is pretty expensive."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"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."
"Pricing should be improved."
"The solution is affordable."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"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."
"The tool's pricing is not unreasonable or non-competitive."
"I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the value received for the price charge."
"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."
"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."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's pricing is generally higher than that of other vendors."
"It is an expensive platform."
"A highly cost-effective solution"
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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
Insurance Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

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: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.