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."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"We have found the product to be scalable."
"It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers."
"It is good for us for onboarding the data. We can connect to multiple data sources, do transformations to make the data usable, and then model it within the transformation. Someone who has come from a Microsoft Excel environment will easily be able to use this solution. Power query and report modeling are easy to understand in this solution. Their technical support is very good. They are extremely responsive, helpful, and hands-on."
"Technical support is quite good."
"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"There is continual improvement year-over-year."
"Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"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 solution seems to slow down the servers."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for the solution."
"I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment."
"The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors."
"There are some problems with the functionality of this solution. The dashboard is not very user friendly and is quite complicated."
"The solution could be quicker at rendering data."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "
"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."
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.