IBM Cognos Analytics vs. Looker

I use predictive analytics techniques, which can help me predict my future sales based on collected data, giving me insight into my market's trends.This market data can be analyzed, giving me the opportunity to gain in-depth insight into my market's competition and positioning it competitively, aided by developing strategies to improve my marketing approach.

Incentivized

When you need to create a centralised dashboard for multiple stakeholders that blends cross-channel reporting. As an SEO agency reporting for clients - Looker is a great solution. It's less appropriate depending on the intended users. For instance, in my experience Looker reports have been under-utilised because they're not accessed regularly, provide too much noise or often simple PDF reports are preferred

Incentivized

• Data Visualization: Plenty of options exist for multiple use cases, and dashboards are easy to implement and customize.
• Integration with IBM Watson: makes it easy to use Watson AI features (NLP etc.) on your data.
• Its advanced analytics functionalities with powerful pattern detection/prediction models.

Incentivized

• It is very easy to start a new dashboard and configure what you want to display by just selecting/dragging from the list of available columns.
• It is intuitive, mainly if you use other Google services like Google Sheets.
• The look and feel is modern and nice.
• It it very useful to have an immediate visual overview of the data in a spreadsheet.

Incentivized

• API integration is not upto the mark with very limited options.
• Laptops get overheated when the tool is used from moderate to heavy use. Also, there is a lag in the tool times.
• Licensing & Maintenance can go from cheap to expensive depending on the scope.
• Lot of scope to improve the customer support & its not upto the industry standards.

Incentivized

• I wish I could get more granular in the Google ad data, such as down to the campaign type, instead of having to see only all campaigns.
• The setup can be time-consuming if you're not using the product regularly.
• Editing the dashboard requires a few logins; I wish it was more seamless.

Incentivized

It took my BI team one year to become productive at developing useful content on the IBM Cognos platform. After this year, the reports being developed for a client were stale and no longer relative to the ever changing needs of the business client. Given the same opportunity, I would select a platform that allows the team to quickly produce BI content. Fail fast and recover quickly!

We are very haooy with Looker, it provides us with all the funciomalities we need for both the day to day oerformance tracking and longer periods reporting. It is easy to use for account managers, configurable and customizable for soecialists and what is most imoortant, our clinets generally really love it

Incentivized

We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.

Looker is relatively easy to use, even as it is set up. The customers for the front-end only have issues with the initial setup for looker ml creations. Other "looks" are relatively easy to set up, depending on the ETL and the data which is coming into Looker on a regular basis.

Incentivized

Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point

No objections

Incentivized

Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.

Somehow resources heavy, both on server and client. I recommned at least 50Mbs data rate and high performance desktop comouter to be abke to run comolex tasks and configure larger amount of data. On the other hand, the client does not need to worry when viewing, the performance is usually ok

Incentivized

Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.

Incentivized

Never had to work with support for issues. Any questions we had, they would respond promptly and clearly. The one-time setup was easy, by reading documentation. If the feature is not supported, they will add a feature request. In this case, LDAP support was requested over OKTA. They are looking into it.

Incentivized

Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.

The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us

The implementation was handled very well. The initial implementation exposed a lot of disagreement between our campuses and departments as to how we define data. This was not entirely unexpected, but I thought that we did a nice job as a team to work through some of these challenges.

Very satisfied, easy to implement

Incentivized

Power BI is stronger for quick ad-hoc analysis and dashboards, but IBM Cognos Analytics is better when consistency, precision, and mass distribution matter. Tableau is best for interactive analysis, while IBM Cognos Analytics is better for standardized, repeatable enterprise reporting. Sigma shines for customizable dashboards and drill-down analysis while IBM Cognos Analytics holds an edge in data discovery and visualization.

Incentivized

In my opinion, Looker is no Power BI. It is good, but I think Power BI is amazing. That said, in my experience, Power BI is nowhere near as easy to setup and report on Google services as Looker is. We plan to continue using Power BI for c-suite and corporate reporting, especially for internal databases, but will gladly use Looker for our marketing information for AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, and YouTube.

Incentivized

The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.

• The platform can be pretty pricey.
• Convoluted contracts and they fine you for any breach during audits.
• Things are changed between releases without any warning and break.
• It is second to none at being able to customize list and crosstab type reports.
• You can easily set up a report to be emailed out every day and even have it export the report to a shared folder.
• On-prem environments can be scaled up pretty much as much as you would like.

Incentivized

• Other than some people not liking the numbers, I don't see any negative impacts; we haven't experienced that.
• The reports help us unravel the story of our users and how they are sifting through our pages.
• Our clients enjoy seeing the numbers to understand better what stands out on their sites.
• The reports have helped us see what campaigns are working and where we need to tweak things.
• The reports have enabled us to have better conversations with stakeholders about how their web pages should be modified, edited, etc., to reflect the data.

Incentivized