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.
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"It is a stable product."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."
"I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs."
"It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools."
"It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization."
"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."
"In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"Very intuitive and easy to use."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The solution's support could be better."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."
"Microsoft BI has its own challenges in terms of user interface and how quickly somebody can learn how to use it."
"The solution doesn't integrate well with third-party tools."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"Areas for improvement would be the construction of reports and the dashboard budget."
"I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences."
"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting 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 Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all Reporting 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.