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IBM Cognos vs Kyvos comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Kyvos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
45th
Ranking in Reporting
50th
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 1.5%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kyvos is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Cognos1.5%
Kyvos0.6%
Other97.9%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

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.
SN
Business Analyst at Barclays Capital
A stable solution that can be used for data discovery, but it should include more tutorials for new users
We use Kyvos for data discovery and drilling down to the exact data point The most valuable features of Kyvos are reconciliation and its ability to query big data. Since I couldn't find any tutorials or a handbook, I had some initial difficulty understanding the UI and the whole interface of…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Good mix of abilities for reporting for both technical and non-technical users."
"Framework Manager is the best Metadata Modeling Tool and also Report Studio."
"Moving away from a manual, Excel-based consolidation to a largely automated one has enabled us to reduce our reporting timelines."
"After centralizing the data, the people using the product have the ability to view all the numbers through one single platform and it is providing them the information they need in order to make their business decisions."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The product is perfectly designed for smaller companies to multi-national companies."
"The entire process can be created in the IBM tool from source, to reporting, to administration."
"This BI tool helped automate and centralize production reports."
"The most valuable features of Kyvos are reconciliation and its ability to query big data."
 

Cons

"The stability of the lookups is not very good, and really needs improvement."
"One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine, however, sometimes it can take up to one or two months."
"It definitely needs better data visualization."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"The solution's support could be better."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"Some of its components are not very stable (for instance the lookups)."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Since I couldn't find any tutorials or a handbook, I had some initial difficulty understanding the UI and the whole interface of Kyvos."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"Pricing should be improved."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"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."
"It is pretty expensive."
Information not available
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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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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, ...
Ask a question
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Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
Information Not Available
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