

IBM Cognos and Sisense are both competing in the Business Intelligence (BI) space. IBM Cognos holds a competitive edge in comprehensive reporting features for large enterprises, while Sisense stands out for user-friendliness in visual data analysis.
Features: IBM Cognos offers capabilities like extensive reporting, metadata modeling, and integration with diverse data sources. It is scalable and includes robust scheduling and governance tools. Sisense is known for its intuitive interface, dashboard customization, and efficient data source integration, allowing rapid insights.
Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos needs enhancements in mobile reporting, data visualization flexibility, and performance in metadata management. Sisense could benefit from improvement in data handling flexibility, integration with advanced statistical tools, and exporting controls.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos offers on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, but deployment complexity can be challenging. Technical support is robust yet sometimes slow for complex issues. Sisense provides both cloud and on-premises options with generally positive technical support and quick issue resolution.
Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos is considered expensive, suitable for large enterprises with complex and costly licensing but offers good ROI due to its comprehensive features. Sisense has a competitive subscription model, aligning well with medium-sized organizations for fast deployment and substantial visualization capabilities.
I have seen a return on investment, as I mentioned earlier about time saving and productivity gains, with a consistent governed data model that reduces the risk of errors.
I have seen a return on investment through improved decision making, as automated distribution and uptime, along with scheduled report delivery and bursting, have eliminated various manual emailing and delays, thereby saving time and cost.
Management can now drill down and view executive summaries for new products and fraud analytics quickly, resulting in less red tape during the decision-making process.
It makes it very easy for us to make data-driven decisions and we are able to forecast our future predicament or future plans, hence increasing or boosting productivity in my organization.
Due to the data presented to stakeholders, they are able to make informed decisions that impact the day-to-day operations of the client, giving them more insights into what's happening within their organization.
I have seen a return on investment in that we can manage the Sisense environment with a very small number of users.
Our systems team, operating on a lot of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintaining long-term relations with IBM, benefits from good support coverage.
The customer support has been proactive, solution-oriented, and helpful whenever I have needed to reach out.
I rate technical support from IBM as eight out of ten, indicating a high quality of service.
The support was very good.
We typically get responses within 24 hours.
Sisense customer support has been top-notch, great, and very responsive.
The scalability of IBM Cognos is very good, as it has continued growing with my organization's needs, allowing us to analyze and store a significant amount of data and handle our organization's growth efficiently.
It can be scaled out to other teams, but requires building cubes and implementing policies.
It is scalable to a very large extent and we can integrate any third-party tools.
Sisense's scalability is impressive as it can crunch a lot more data and has consistently better performance.
Sisense works really well for simple to medium use cases and scales well.
I rate the stability of this solution as nine out of ten, indicating it is highly stable.
In my experience, IBM Cognos is stable, as I have not experienced any downtime or lagging issues.
Sisense is very stable and can handle a large amount of data quickly.
Integration with Azure login makes trouble.
IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending.
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.
I would like to see an improvement in the live data connection, specifically making the process faster.
It could provide more connectors to integrate with emerging different data sources to exponentially increase the amount of data it can handle.
I give Sisense a nine because the integration with some third-party tools is good.
Our central team negotiated a different price because multiple teams within our organization use IBM Cognos, bringing the price down to around $10 to $11 per user per month.
I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is positive, as the price is relatively competitive and affordable.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is cost-effective, but for smaller organizations working under a tight budget, this tool might be a bit expensive for them.
There was no significant difference in pricing between Sisense and ThoughtSpot.
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that pricing is a little bit higher when compared to other applications, but that justifies the use case.
The AI features in IBM Cognos helped me gain deeper insights into our business processes, enabling me to make data-driven decisions easily and understand which points need our attention and which areas of our business are performing well.
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.
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.
It offers two ways to access data: by cubing the data or hitting it live.
It allows the user to cater to different use cases and is a very fast aggregator across different data sources, giving you the historical context and helping in operationalizing your data.
Sisense has positively impacted my organization by drastically reducing the time taken to build the data cube, and we can see real-time analytics.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| IBM Cognos | 1.3% |
| Sisense | 1.3% |
| Other | 97.4% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 34 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 23 |
| Large Enterprise | 90 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 28 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 7 |
| Large Enterprise | 14 |
IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.
IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.
IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:
Reviews from Real Users
IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.
Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”
Sisense is an end-to-end business analytics software that enables users to easily prepare and analyze large, complex datasets. Sisense’s Single-Stack BI software includes data preparation, data management, analysis, visualization and reporting capabilities.
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