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."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"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."
"It is a stable product."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"
"Microsoft B's beneficial features are that it is a Microsoft product and it is well known by the staff here in the company. It suited the available skills."
"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."
"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."
"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"It's a powerful platform."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"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 performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"The DAX in Microsoft BI is quite difficult."
"Microsoft BI could improve by allowing large-size data sources. We have large data sources, and we have problems loading them in Microsoft BI."
"The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools."
"The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version."
"I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences."
"Powerpoints are not available in the report server."
"Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data."
"Creating dashboards could be easier."
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.