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.
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"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."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"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."
"MS SQL & SQL Server Analysis Services."
"We have a lot of servers and applications from which we want reports, and it allows us to create reports from an SQL source or some other source."
"It's a straightforward setup."
"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything."
"It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"It seems stable. I haven't heard of any difficulties from my clients that utilize Power BI."
"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."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."
"There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise."
"The solution could improve the mobile application design. It is difficult to use compared to the desktop version."
"The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"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."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
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.