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.
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"We are able to collaborate on things and get insightful data visualizations."
"I like all the tools in Microsoft BI because they all have different purposes. There are a lot of people using Microsoft BI, and everybody is using it. The users have adapted well to the technology."
"Helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management."
"The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones. The visualization is also very good. In terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities."
"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."
"It provides easy integration with Office tools."
"Microsoft BI's dashboards are helpful."
"It's user-friendly and provides data abstracting capabilities. We are also able to share reports with our colleagues very easily."
"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."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features."
"The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics."
"The integration with third-party products could be more stable."
"I would like to see a change in the premium capacity."
"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."
"I would like to see Machine Learning for Power Bi Pro users or an intermediate license to enable Machine Learning if you don't have access to a Premium account."
"If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
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.