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.
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"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."
"This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data."
"PowerBI – Self-service BI."
"The data can be accessed from anywhere."
"We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly."
"It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report."
"It has greatly improved our reporting capabilities."
"The most valuable feature is integration with Python."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"It could have more options for themes."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version."
"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."
"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."
"There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users."
"It should have more integrations."
"Creating dashboards could be easier."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"When we have a big report with lots of data, the solution slows down quite a lot."
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.