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.
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"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."
"It is a stable product."
"Tech support is very helpful."
"We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding."
"It is easy to use. It has got a desktop where people can develop their own dashboards. Basically, we have figured out how to connect finance contracts and all programs for the government agency. So, they can see everything in a dashboard. So, it is very easy to use from a technical standpoint of view."
"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."
"Considering that it's Microsoft, it can be integrated with the Power Platform, which is also Microsoft-based, like SharePoint, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, which is the most user-friendly."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"We find the solution offers good stability."
"Previously we used Excel, which took a long time - two or three weeks - to bring the data into a uniform format, whereas BI can do the same job in a day."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"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."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"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."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"We did have some issues building the Microsoft blog."
"This solution is resource-heavy."
"The reporting part of Microsoft BI is rather limited compared to other reporting tools."
"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."
"For someone who is new, I think that Power BI can be a little complicated."
"I think that the solution is harder to use for people who are not experts in data."
"Our expectation is putting BI to work in real-time data collection systems in the maritime environment."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 131 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.
