We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Microsoft BI based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, it is a more lightweight solution than IBM Cognos.
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Technical support has been great."
"The solution is easy to set up and implement."
"I like the flexibility it offers."
"I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"Very intuitive and easy to use."
"Power BI allows you to create user defined charts which is really useful."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"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."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The solution's support could be better."
"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for the solution."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."
"Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data."
"Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources."
"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". IBM Cognos is most compared with Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. See our IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Reporting vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.