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.
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."
"We have found the product very stable and reliable."
"I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"Reporting is the best thing about Power BI. And it could help improve decision-making in many ways. Power BI is flexible and easier to use compared to tools."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."
"Technical support is quite good."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"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."
"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."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The solution's support could be better."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"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 is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."
"I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution."
"I have found using Microsoft BI is not easy. For example, trying to use the auto-refresh feature is not simple."
"The solution could be quicker at rendering data."
"The cost of the solution can get high."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 129 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 293 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 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.