IBM Cognos Analytics vs. Klipfolio Klips

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

It's
a piece of software that's capable of almost anything. Dynamic variables can be
changed in real-time via the interface's UI/UX and UI/UX customizations. As a
result, it can always keep its database up-to-date and obtain the most current
information from a variety of sources. The Klip customer service team is
extremely friendly and helpful. Every time a problem with the Klip setup
arises, they're there to help. As a result of their activities, they try to
work with the group's experience.

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

• Dashboard design. Super simple and easy to set up, move and size components, and display.
• Klip creation. This is report/chart creation. Klipfolio straddles the line well between ease-of-use and robust capability for data crunching and visualization.
• Data sync. I have had very few data sync issues. The sync just works and it is very light-weight on API calls.
• Multiple data source formats. You can make data sources in JSON, Summarized View, and Detailed View.
• Modeled data sources. You can create modeled versions of any data source, which allows you to lock in data formats, add columns (including formula columns), and more.
• Team permissions. I have been able to set team permission sets and use that to display the given dashboards around the office. With this, I can control who has access to which data.
• Chart options. There is a great selection of chart types to choose from.
• Great support. Their support staff has always been very responsive—almost always immediate. I have always been able to resolve my issues with them.

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

• Onboarding. The process of setting up a new client for a dashboard can be a little tedious.
• File size upload and third-party integrations. I have been limited to the size of the .csv file we were uploading but we were able to find a workaround.

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 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.

My initial impressions of the software have been extremely positive. There are YouTube tutorials that explain how to make klips. The intuitive design of the UI It appears that everything in this software has been thoroughly tested to create all the visualizations that can be imagined as well as the user input controls that allow users to have exactly the data they want to be displayed in seconds, considering the various functions and formulas available in the Excel integrations and the extensive list of other services that can be integrated.

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

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.

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

It provides all the necessary information to be able to carry out the analysis of any type of business, to know how money is managed virtually, what to do to have greater visibility, in addition to being a platform that is always accessible and allows continuous and efficient work.

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.

None at all; just be sure of what information you will need for working.

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

It was clear that Klipfolio had the edge in terms of the number of third-party connectors and templates available, allowing us to quickly be up and running with various API integrations and visually stunning designs in only an hour. It was a no-brainer for us, and we're glad we went with them instead of the other options.

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

• Klipfolio not only delivers great-looking dashboards, but it makes our agency look awesome to our clients!
• Klipfolio is one of the few platforms that we have implemented where the minimal investment has consistently provided maximum results in the return on our investment.
• Not only had Klipfolio proven to be a fiscally smart - money-saving - move, but has also proven to be a great time saver as well.
• Thanks to Klipfolio we spend less time having to pull data and have more time to analyze and strategize for our reporting and recommendations to our clients.

Incentivized