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 three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Provides good data flow related to the container and control flow."
"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."
"What I have found valuable about Microsoft BI is its performance and ease of use. The interface is very simple and it is accessible to everyone. If someone is new to this type of solution it is straightforward to understand."
"Microsoft B's beneficial features are that it is a Microsoft product and it is well known by the staff here in the company. It suited the available skills."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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 thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included."
"The product could have better analytics capabilities."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports."
"Technical support could be a bit better."
"The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section."
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.