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.
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."
"The capability to add custom visuals and create Power BI apps. You can package datasets, synchronization details, and dashboards into a single app."
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"It's a powerful platform."
"It provides good visibility."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"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."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The solution's support could be better."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"Sometimes while developing, the front end is not easily customizable and it has limitations. We cannot go and do any UI we want. We have to stick to the limitations of the product."
"It should have more integrations."
"The setup took a lot of tinkering with InfoSec to allow us to do stuff."
"The data source definition is all over the place."
"It is definitely a wonderful analytics tool. However, database ETL, data integration functionality would be absolutely perfect in many cases. Currently, it doesn't get the job done and we need to extract, transform, and load the data from faulty data sets into something more suitable for the deployment of the analytics tool."
"Power BI could be improved by implementing more options for data integration. Nowadays, the cloud takes care of scalability and security. As we all know, data sources are increasing, so we get data from a variety of streams. But if we could get the downstream data into the database and update the reports more easily, Power BI would be better."
"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."
"Actionable insights could be better."
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.