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 feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"Constant collaboration is the most valuable. I can build a dashboard, and several co-workers can access this dashboard. We can share information that is important for decision-making. It is a very easy-to-deploy solution. It is compatible with a lot of data sources. It is also very stable and scalable. There is also a very good forum and a lot of help and online training."
"Microsoft BI's dashboards are helpful."
"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."
"The initial setup is easy."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial."
"Power BI allows you to create user defined charts which is really useful."
"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"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)."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"The formatting template could be improved."
"Microsoft BI lacks integration capabilities, so it needs to consider increasing its integration capabilities."
"Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable."
"Capacity could be improved."
"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"It needs a wizard that covers all its options."
"The setup took a lot of tinkering with InfoSec to allow us to do stuff."
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.