No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

CA Deliver vs IBM Cognos comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CA Deliver
Ranking in Reporting
31st
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM Cognos
Ranking in Reporting
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of CA Deliver is 1.0%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.1%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos3.1%
CA Deliver1.0%
Other95.9%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

it_user837525 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer (Sr. level II) at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Gives us one repository for various output formats and retention periods
A common theme with all CA products is they state compatibility with new technologies when it has not yet been proven. Much like other technology companies that have fallen into this trap, let feature and compatibly releases be controlled by the technical group, instead of the marketing and/or management people. I cite the example that CA mainframe products were deemed to be compatible with Extended Address Volumes (EAV) - larger sized disk volumes - when they were not. I have been doing this for 37 years and see it all too often, sometimes to the detriment of the company itself (Storage Technology Corp. and its Iceberg array comes to mind).
RL
Senior Project Manager at BD
Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Extremely stable and reliable, and easy to install."
"Having one repository for various output formats and retention periods. Provides the flexibility to establish hundreds of different retention entries, based upon business need, and then group the like retention period outputs together on the same media. It is very efficient."
"Flexibility of report configuration; allows for quick and simple amendments to definitions."
"The benefits are that it keeps their information for over 40 to 50 years, so in essence it's a digital bank for customer information."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"This is an all-in-one solution that provides reporting for a lot of different reports and visualizations."
"The storytelling feature is most valuable because it has a more explanatory approach which is really convenient for building up monthly reports with some context."
"Workspace Advanced and Workspace are very intuitive and simple to use for a basic user."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"It enables me to see trends of data we have from different angles and each end-user can run ad-hoc queries themselves."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
 

Cons

"Needs ability to allow export to xls/pdf, etc. (Note: this is available in add-on product CA – OM Web Viewer)."
"I work with the developers so I get what I want built into the project."
"A common theme with all CA products is they state compatibility with new technologies when it has not yet been proven. I cite the example that CA mainframe products were deemed to be compatible with Extended Address Volumes (EAV) - larger sized disk volumes - when they were not."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"We are finding ‘undocumented features’ on a daily basis and reporting issues to IBM."
"This is an easy one: visualizations. While being able to use them to provide client-side filtering in Active reports is great, they are so far behind the functionality offered in the basic Cognos charts, it is almost laughable that they even offer them in the product."
"Data Manager, InfoSphere, and Framework manager can be a little more user-friendly."
"Timely bug fixes."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"​Pricing is reasonable, licensing model suitable for large enterprises."
"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."
"It is averagely priced."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"It is pretty expensive."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Reporting solutions are best for your needs.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Regarding improvements for IBM Cognos, I think nothing yet about functionality, but I find the costs to be quite high for the enterprise system. However, since we need it, we continue to renew our ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos at my place of work is primarily for business intelligence (BI), mostly for serving, and we appreciate it because it covers the full BI stack, including dashboards, ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ERGO
More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Deliver vs. IBM Cognos and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.