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.
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"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 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 most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"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."
"Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data."
"The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"The solution's support could be better."
"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."
"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."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"When it comes to improvement, I would say there could be more tutorials for students in universities who are just learning it. And it wouldn't have to be just for students in universities. It might also be for the people who use it in the real world."
"I would prefer that the solution not be shared. I'm concerned that if we make a mistake we could reveal information to people who shouldn't see it. I would like to have my own on-prem server, to buy my own server and have my own infrastructure for Microsoft BI, with only with my data."
"Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market."
"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."
"Needs single sign-on."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
"I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution."
"The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."
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.