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.
"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."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"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."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"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 straightforward."
"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 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 product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"There is continual improvement year-over-year."
"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."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"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."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"It could have more options for themes."
"Microsoft Power BI can be confusing, because it has two languages that you need to learn if you want to use it, and this makes it more difficult for nontechnical users."
"It needs a wizard that covers all its options."
"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."
"The DAX features need some improvement. It's not as easy as Excel. They need more DAX formulas."
"It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it."
"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 licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions."
"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."
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.