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IBM Cognos vs Workday Prism Analytics 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
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (6th)
Workday Prism Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.3%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Workday Prism Analytics is 0.9%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.3%
Workday Prism Analytics0.9%
Other97.8%
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.
Anirban Chatterjee - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager at Deloitte
Provides superior integration capabilities and ability to handle complex data transformations 
One area for improvement in the solution is the ability to manually update individual rows or columns of data once it has been uploaded. Any correction requires reloading the entire dataset from the source, which can be inefficient. They should include a feature for granular data updates, allowing users to edit specific entries without reloading entire datasets.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM has a wonderful support portal where you can submit tickets for issues that are way too complex to understand or control on your own, and the fix central portal will get back to you ASAP and provide solutions to fix your problems."
"It is an enterprise level solution for BI that holds value in a traditional BI sense."
"IBM Cognos has allowed our company to manage all the data we generate and helped us improve the results."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"In terms of BI tools, I'd advise others that this is one of the best."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"You will not need to manually rebuild or deploy the cube any more as everything will be done automatically on schedule."
"Feature-wise, I feel that the solution's stability is good."
"I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation."
"The product is easier to use compared to other applications."
"The customer service and support are pretty good."
"The solution is stable and reliable, with minimal issues affecting its performance."
 

Cons

"Cognos Dashboard requires more IT skill to create and maintain as compared to Tableau."
"Report Studio: While using the dimensional model package, the reporting language could be made more user-friendly."
"Support can be sometimes be disappointing."
"I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses."
"There is room for improvement in the user interface, which might simply be a learning curve issue."
"A lot of expertise is required to be able to navigate and perform simple tasks, as well as to create reports with Cognos TM1."
"It's hard to change built-in options."
"One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine, however, sometimes it can take up to one or two months."
"There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics."
"The visualization techniques must be upgraded."
"One area for improvement in the solution is the ability to manually update individual rows or columns of data once it has been uploaded."
"It is not a very scalable product."
"When you create certain objects, a lot of the time, the fields are text. They’re not numeric, date, or any other field type"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"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."
"Pricing should be improved."
"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."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool."
"The solution is very expensive."
"I do not know of the licensing cost, but there are additional costs like 5,00,000 for recruitment modules."
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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
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
No data available
 

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, ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workday Prism Analytics?
Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool. In fact, that has been one of the hindrance factors for Workday in making Prism Analytics more sellable.
What needs improvement with Workday Prism Analytics?
I think there are still some gaps in the solution. There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics. For now, Workday has enabled the SFTP server and Am...
What is your primary use case for Workday Prism Analytics?
As a consultant, I use Prism Analytics to implement my client systems. I first have design sessions with them, where we discuss their business gaps and then understand how Workday Prism Analytics c...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Prism Analytics
 

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.
Denny's
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Workday Prism Analytics and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.