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.
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"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 Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS."
"Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"The solution is stable."
"It is very good, and it supports the Microsoft ecosystem, including Excel, etc."
"We are able to collaborate on things and get insightful data visualizations."
"Key features are its dashboard functionality and ease of integration with various data sources."
"I like the flexibility it offers."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance."
"The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features."
"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."
"I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users."
"Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do more in-depth analysis and represent the findings."
"The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version."
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.