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IBM Cognos vs QlikView
March 19, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
9★
From business intelligence to financial performance and strategy management to analytics applications, Cognos software can provide what your organization needs to become top-performing and analytics-driven. With products for the individual, workgroup, department, midsize business and large enterprise, Cognos software is designed to help everyone in your organization make the decisions that achieve better business outcomes—for now and in the future.
15★
The QlikView Business Discovery platform delivers true self-service business intelligence that empowers business users and drives innovative decision making. It helps organizations make transformative discoveries that lead to better decisions. QlikView goes beyond what other BI software provides by enabling users to analyze and search their data visualizations, make associations, and uncover insight that other BI tools can't find. What will you discover?
IBM Cognos and QlikView are both splendidly clever pieces of software designed to help humans make sense of the vast, swirling chaos of data they insist on collecting. They let you create reports, dashboards and visualizations, all of which look terribly important in board meetings. They also both pretend to be self-service tools, meaning you don’t need IT to help you—until you inevitably do. They can connect to all sorts of data sources, from spreadsheets to massive databases and they come in both on-premises and cloud flavors, because everything does these days.
IBM Cognos, being the elder statesman of the pair, was first released in 1984 in the mystical land of Canada, presumably before people realized how much trouble structured data could cause. It is very serious about things like enterprise governance and making sure everything is properly controlled by IT departments, who are often the only ones who can actually get it to do what it promises. It’s particularly good at generating vast and complex reports that nobody reads but everyone insists are essential. More recently, it has acquired some AI-powered analytics, which means it can now make impressively intelligent guesses at things you should already know.
QlikView, by contrast, hails from Sweden and has been around since 1994, quietly making itself useful in the background while everyone argued about spreadsheets. It takes a rather more adventurous approach, letting users click around merrily, discovering unexpected patterns in their data and wondering why they didn’t see them before. It works with an in-memory engine, meaning everything happens very fast, which is thrilling until you realize your assumptions were completely wrong, just more quickly. Unlike Cognos, it doesn’t insist on IT control, which means users can create their own reports until they create such a mess that IT has to step in anyway.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
IBM Cognos, being the elder statesman of the pair, was first released in 1984 in the mystical land of Canada, presumably before people realized how much trouble structured data could cause. It is very serious about things like enterprise governance and making sure everything is properly controlled by IT departments, who are often the only ones who can actually get it to do what it promises. It’s particularly good at generating vast and complex reports that nobody reads but everyone insists are essential. More recently, it has acquired some AI-powered analytics, which means it can now make impressively intelligent guesses at things you should already know.
QlikView, by contrast, hails from Sweden and has been around since 1994, quietly making itself useful in the background while everyone argued about spreadsheets. It takes a rather more adventurous approach, letting users click around merrily, discovering unexpected patterns in their data and wondering why they didn’t see them before. It works with an in-memory engine, meaning everything happens very fast, which is thrilling until you realize your assumptions were completely wrong, just more quickly. Unlike Cognos, it doesn’t insist on IT control, which means users can create their own reports until they create such a mess that IT has to step in anyway.
See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
