GoodData vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

If you have consistently formatted data, that you want regular reports on, plus flexibility to let end users build their own reports, GoodData is perfect. Especially if your end users are less technical. If you want to be able to embed your reporting into your app, GoodData excels, though the start up process can be involved. If your data structure varies, it could be more challenging to integrate. It may also not be worth the integration if you have people who can already run their own SQL queries.

Incentivized

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

• GoodData helps in simplifying complex data into easy-to-understand visuals. We can create personalized dashboards & tailor them as per requirements. This data can be used from an executive level employee to a team lead employee in the business
• GoodData is a very user friendly platform. The collaborative features simplify sharing and discussing reports among team members which promotes a culture of data-driven decision-making.
• GoodData connects with various data sources and consolidate information from multiple platforms. This flexibility proves invaluable for businesses dealing with data spread across different systems as they can access large amount of data on a single platform.

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

• would be nice to be able to add the same filter to a multi-tab dashboard once instead of having to do it for each tab; tedious and time consuming
• Variable use is kind of clunky and would like to be able to hide/show easier
• The newer insight based dashboard method does not have the flexibility classic does

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

Each client I have worked with and spoken too has renewed their GoodData subscription. I know of not one to date that has cancelled. The GoodData platform has a very high rate of renewal from the discussions I have had with their internal teams as well

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!

GoodData provided us with strong overall usability and provided us a platform for various business analytics. Its user-friendly and insightful reports and also the dashboards. Me and my team really appreciate the platform's ability to streamline decision-making processes. However, there is a learning curve during initial setup as I mentioned before. Continuous improvements in the onboarding could further enhance GoodData's usability as well.

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.

We are approximately one month since go-live. There has been one short outage.

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

Performance on refreshing metrics works well.

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.

The fast and comprehensive responses we got from GoodData regarding the doubts we had experienced while starting to use the products and metrics were of great help in ensuring the metrics we were obtaining were accurate to what we wanted to know about our customers' experience and our product areas of opportunity.

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

Petr was a rock star - patient, knowledgeable, clear and easy to work with.

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.

GoodData implementation team was professional and courteous

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

Thorough, professional and on time.

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.

GoodData comparing to other platform is very easy to use, customer support and on-boarding support. Set of features, speed of integration in our platform. Also great benefit for us was very competetive pricing.

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

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.

• I personally pushed our management to get GoodData implemented, and there on we have been making much more profits than we ever did!
• Last month we made a decision using the platform and withing a short span of time our ROI gets 7X.
• We also made a marketing spend of $100,000 every quater using the insights and metrics, and we are really happy with the returs.

Incentivized

• 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