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."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"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."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Key features are its dashboard functionality and ease of integration with various data sources."
"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."
"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"
"Its connection to every database: Whatever and wherever it is."
"In my experience the scalability is good. You are able to increase users and add more data."
"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."
"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"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."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"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."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"It needs a wizard that covers all its options."
"The accounting data needs improvement."
"Needs single sign-on."
"Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik."
"I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports."
"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."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 131 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.