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 comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"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."
"This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data."
"I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The solution is easy to set up and implement."
"The solution is very easy to use."
"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."
"The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible."
"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."
"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 high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users."
"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"The cost of the solution can get high."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward."
"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.