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.
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"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."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"Microsoft BI was very helpful for me because I had a huge variety of connections. It is very convenient to build reports, even if somebody has no experience using BI tools or data visualizations. Additionally, the performance is very good when generating reports."
"I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."
"The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on."
"We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time. It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS."
"Sometimes while developing, the front end is not easily customizable and it has limitations. We cannot go and do any UI we want. We have to stick to the limitations of the product."
"The initial setup is a little bit technical."
"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."
"I think that the solution is harder to use for people who are not experts in data."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."
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.