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 product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."
"It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"In the early stage of an implementation, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The reports are easy to create."
"With the out-of-the-box Data Platform and Business Intelligence ecosystem, you get the entire platform with a single license."
"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."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"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."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."
"The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards."
"The report server feature is quite limited."
"SSMS & SSRS."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI."
"The mobile app is very poor."
"We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses."
"Power BI could have better metadata management. It's easy to use for a single person. However, it lacks an enterprise-grade metadata management system, which can be a problem if you're doing an enterprise deployment with multiple users."
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.