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.
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"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."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."
"Two valuable most features are the ability to create columns and create measures."
"Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau."
"Its data visualization provides the user the ability to quickly look at data and focus on relevant information, allowing them to make an immediate decision."
"I think the visualization part is valuable."
"We have found the product to be scalable."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"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."
"The charts and graphics are weak."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"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 high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"I would like them to provide a license that just allows us to see dashboards. What I don't like about this solution is that in order to just watch a dashboard, you need a license. Currently, you need to purchase a full license of Power BI Pro just to see something, which is not attractive. If you have a license, you can see a shared dashboard, but you can also build a dashboard or you can collaborate with other people. However, if you only want to see a dashboard, there is no license for that. I only want to see the dashboard, and I don't want to do anything more than watching the information on the dashboard. There is no license that allows you to see a shared dashboard. This is one of the areas of opportunity because I would like a lot of people to be able to see a shared dashboard, not to interact with it or to collaborate online with it. I would like to see more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources. Given the fact that everything is related to Microsoft Azure and all services available on Microsoft Azure, I see that they're building more connections to Microsoft Azure services instead of other non-Microsoft services. I understand the strategy, but it would be good to have more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources."
"I would like to see better, undisturbed stability without any interruptions."
"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in."
"Microsoft BI lacks integration capabilities, so it needs to consider increasing its integration capabilities."
"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."
"More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations."
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.