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.
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The product is stable."
"It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned."
"It is easy to work with and very chic."
"The initial setup is simple to do."
"We have found the product very stable and reliable."
"We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way."
"The product is easy to use and simple to navigate."
"The way data is presented is very valuable. The amount of information that we can get at a glance is also valuable. You can then drill-down and see data from many different angles in the same chart by selecting certain things. Based on the selection, everything changes automatically. If we have four parameters in a particular item, when you select a parameter, the remaining charts on that page automatically change for that particular parameter."
"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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"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."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"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."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The biggest thing with Microsoft right now is better support. There should be more timely support. We can do 90% of it ourselves by the same token. When we're into the 10%, we do not get timely support via Microsoft's support team."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another."
"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."
"The product could have better analytics capabilities."
"The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools."
"The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 11 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 22 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 "User friendly, easy to set up and great for analyzing data". 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.