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 solution's initial setup process is easy."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"We have found the product very stable and reliable."
"The use of graphics to show and view the data indicators is the most valuable feature. It is also very stable."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"Many of my customers already use Microsoft products like Office 365, so I often propose Microsoft Power BI because it integrates well with all the standard Microsoft business tools. And it's the quickest tool to implement and start using daily."
"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."
"It's quite flexible, and it's easy to create reports using this system. It is very graphic and very user friendly."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"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."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools."
"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."
"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."
"One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies."
"The report server feature is quite limited."
"Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution."
"Technical support could be a bit better."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 293 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 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.