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.
"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."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"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."
"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."
"Easy to use. End-users can make changes to the graphics."
"I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"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."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"I would like for there to be some type of user manual that shows steps on how to navigate the solution."
"The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"I feel the modeling page should be simplified."
"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."
"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."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"If you have to pull multiple data sources performance is somewhat lacking."
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.