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 solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"It is a stable product."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"The capability to add custom visuals and create Power BI apps. You can package datasets, synchronization details, and dashboards into a single app."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"Very intuitive and easy to use."
"Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features."
"The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible."
"The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website."
"It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The formatting template could be improved."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
"One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel."
"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."
"We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS."
"The mobile app is very poor."
"One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes."
"My data is restricted to my DB and I'm not sure how this would handle an extremely large dataset."
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.