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.
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"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."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything."
"It's a pretty scalable product."
"Power BI allows you to create user defined charts which is really useful."
"It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite."
"We find the solution offers good stability."
"It's similar to Excel, but it's much more powerful than Excel."
"One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"The solution's support could be better."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."
"These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid. I guess that is a risk you take in business."
"SSMS & SSRS."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI."
"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"
"You need to purchase upgraded support separately."
"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."
"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."
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.