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."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"It is a stable product."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"It provides good visibility."
"I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated."
"I like all the tools in Microsoft BI because they all have different purposes. There are a lot of people using Microsoft BI, and everybody is using it. The users have adapted well to the technology."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."
"We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"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."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about 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."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium."
"This solution is resource-heavy."
"My data is restricted to my DB and I'm not sure how this would handle an extremely large dataset."
"The solution could improve the mobile application design. It is difficult to use compared to the desktop version."
"The data source definition is all over the place."
"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."
"This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality."
"Real-time updating needs improvement."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 11 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 22 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 "User friendly, easy to set up and great for analyzing data". IBM Cognos is most compared with Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Databricks. 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.