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.
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"It's user-friendly and provides data abstracting capabilities. We are also able to share reports with our colleagues very easily."
"Other people can access data much more easily than before. Its usability is the main advantage, people in the company are using it."
"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."
"Power BI, once made available, can connect to various data sources, irrespective of the application, whether it be HR or business applications. The bank has many applications, but all eventually need to generate reports for tracking, distribution, or problem-finding based on analysis. Power BI was made available as part of the productivity suite to all businesses, which can connect to their applications and provide the reports and analysis they require."
"Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R."
"Management reporting solution that's very stable and scalable."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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 AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"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."
"We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses."
"The licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions."
"Powerpoints are not available in the report server."
"I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward."
"I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance."
"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."
"I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences."
"Actionable insights could be better."
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.