We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Looker based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"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 three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"The product is easy to use."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Stability needs improvement."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Looker is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and IBM Controller, whereas Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and Domo.
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