We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and ThoughtSpot based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."
"The scalability is good."
"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."
"It is easy to set up the solution."
"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."
"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases."
"The initial setup was very straightforward."
"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"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."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."
"In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do."
"The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot."
"The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases."
"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."
"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."
"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."
"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while ThoughtSpot is ranked 15th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 8 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while ThoughtSpot is rated 7.6. 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 ThoughtSpot writes "You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion, whereas ThoughtSpot is most compared with Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, Amazon QuickSight and Angles Professional. See our IBM Cognos vs. ThoughtSpot report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.