We performed a comparison between Databricks and IBM Cognos based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Microsoft, Alteryx and others in Data Science Platforms."The built-in optimization recommendations halved the speed of queries and allowed us to reach decision points and deliver insights very quickly."
"The initial setup phase of Databricks was good."
"Databricks is hosted on the cloud. It is very easy to collaborate with other team members who are working on it. It is production-ready code, and scheduling the jobs is easy."
"Can cut across the entire ecosystem of open source technology to give an extra level of getting the transformatory process of the data."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"Imageflow is a visual tool that helps make it easier for business people to understand complex workflows."
"It can send out large data amounts."
"We have the ability to scale, collaborate and do machine learning."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"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."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Some of the error messages that we receive are too vague, saying things like "unknown exception", and these should be improved to make it easier for developers to debug problems."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"The interface of Databricks could be easier to use when compared to other solutions. It is not easy for non-data scientists. The user interface is important before we had to write code manually and as solutions move to "No code AI" it is critical that the interface is very good."
"The product should incorporate more learning aspects. It needs to have a free trial version that the team can practice."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present."
"There is room for improvement in the documentation of processes and how it works."
"CI/CD needs additional leverage and support."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"It could have more options for themes."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while IBM Cognos is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Dremio and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio, whereas IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Oracle Hyperion.
We monitor all Data Science Platforms 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.