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.
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"Reporting is the best thing about Power BI. And it could help improve decision-making in many ways. Power BI is flexible and easier to use compared to tools."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"The stability is great and continues to get better and better."
"It's a pretty scalable product."
"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."
"My primary use is for view of the dashboard."
"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."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version."
"It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it."
"Microsoft BI lacks integration capabilities, so it needs to consider increasing its integration capabilities."
"I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version."
"The solution could improve the mobile application design. It is difficult to use compared to the desktop version."
"It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use. For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 293 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 Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Databricks. 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.