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 initial setup is very straightforward."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"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."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"Other people can access data much more easily than before. Its usability is the main advantage, people in the company are using it."
"The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards."
"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."
"Technical support has been great."
"The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial."
"It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report."
"It is good for us for onboarding the data. We can connect to multiple data sources, do transformations to make the data usable, and then model it within the transformation. Someone who has come from a Microsoft Excel environment will easily be able to use this solution. Power query and report modeling are easy to understand in this solution. Their technical support is very good. They are extremely responsive, helpful, and hands-on."
"The initial setup is simple to do."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"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."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"It should have more report outputs. They should expand the report outputs. Its documentation should also be better."
"here are some limitations with the data models needed to build the report."
"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."
"We need more integration capabilities."
"I think that the solution is harder to use for people who are not experts in data."
"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."
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.