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.
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"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."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The stability is good."
"In my experience the scalability is good. You are able to increase users and add more data."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."
"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."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"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."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved for reporting aspects."
"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."
"If I have to update data automatically, where I have to pin the gateway, it doesn't update. There is a scheduled refresh functionality so that it refreshes automatically, but I find it very hard to make it work."
"We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."
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.