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.
"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."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis."
"We have found that the reporting and publishing are great."
"The user experience is easy. Users get familiar with it quickly."
"Being able to transfer data with the Power Query feature is great for teaching with about one to two hundred rows of data. I am also able to see the relationship between multiple tables and create various sheets and dashboards."
"The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time. It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet."
"The fact that you can visualize items is great."
"The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial."
"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"I would like to be able to use more predicting data science features without having to use R."
"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved for reporting aspects."
"Real-time updating needs improvement."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"Microsoft is behind IBM when it comes to security features."
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.