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 most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"It is a stable product."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"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."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do."
"I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."
"In the early stage of an implementation, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected."
"The most valuable features are the easy creation of reports, dashboards, and the ability to perform analysis. It is important for us to create reports because we have some operations during certain hours and we can use this tool to track the information."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"It is a pretty straightforward and flexible solution for data integration and modeling. It is a low-code solution. When you are doing data integration, you can use the GUI, which is very simple and straightforward. You can also do very intricate custom queries and model it at different levels. It is very easy to use and scalable."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"It could have more options for themes."
"I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in."
"The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. This is what Microsoft can work on."
"The accounting data needs improvement."
"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes."
"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."
"My data is restricted to my DB and I'm not sure how this would handle an extremely large dataset."
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.