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.
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned."
"It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite."
"The most valuable feature is integration with Python."
"We have found the product very stable and reliable."
"This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly."
"Previously we used Excel, which took a long time - two or three weeks - to bring the data into a uniform format, whereas BI can do the same job in a day."
"Technical support is quite responsive."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"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."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"There are some limitations in Power BI; you have to work in the Power BI base. However, if you want something not out-of-the-box and you want something custom, you have to do a lot of work."
"At times, I feel that the system needs improvement in single sign-on, especially for the on-premises side of the tool."
"It is easy enough. I don't see any real substantial improvements that are needed. It is great as it is, but its interface could be a bit modern."
"The mobile app is very poor."
"The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version."
"There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide describing the visual."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually."
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.