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 Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"It is a stable product."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"There was a lot of manual work involved with Excel, whereas once we moved on to Microsoft Power BI, it was a cleaner dashboard and it was faster too."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"In my experience the scalability is good. You are able to increase users and add more data."
"In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"It's pretty easy to set up the product."
"There is continual improvement year-over-year."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with."
"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"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."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The solution's support could be better."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable."
"Integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved."
"Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop."
"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."
"I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that. Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has."
"here are some limitations with the data models needed to build the report."
"Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 293 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 Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Databricks. 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.