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 offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"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'."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"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."
"The product is easy to use and simple to navigate."
"I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated."
"The solution has a good toggling feature."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The product is stable."
"The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI."
"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."
"The scalability is good. We have 20 people in my organization using this solution and plan to increase usage."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake."
"I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution."
"The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack."
"The accounting data needs improvement."
"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."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."
"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."
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.