We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Oracle Essbase based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"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."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"It's a very powerful analytical engine with Essbase as the back end. We can analyze, transform, or utilize a big chunk of data for our calculations."
"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM 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."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Oracle Essbase is ranked 10th in Database Development and Management with 12 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Oracle Essbase is rated 8.4. 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 Oracle Essbase writes " Handles a huge amount of data at a time and offers good processing speed". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, Oracle Hyperion and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, whereas Oracle Essbase is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics and Databricks.
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