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.
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"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."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"As it was my first time using Power BI, I can say that it was fairly easy to learn, especially if you already know BI-type tools."
"The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial."
"Power BI has strong support from Microsoft. If you need help, they answer promptly. There are also several discussion groups where you can get information, like the product roadmap and any new things coming up."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is the drill-through feature that takes you to a details page the users want to see."
"The solution has a good toggling feature."
"Ease of development and maintenance."
"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."
"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."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"My data is restricted to my DB and I'm not sure how this would handle an extremely large dataset."
"When there are large amounts of data being processed there are additional tools needed to handle it."
"They asked you to pay if you want to synchronize more than eight times, you would have to go to a Power BI enterprise license, which is much more costly."
"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."
"When we have a big report with lots of data, the solution slows down quite a lot."
"Trend data and dashboards need improvement."
"Power BI's drillthrough feature could be improved. I didn't like drillthrough and those options much, but I did like it in MicroStrategy."
"There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you."
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.