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."A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"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."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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."
"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'."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The product is easy to use."
"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."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Stability needs improvement."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"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."
"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 product does not have documented material."
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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