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."
"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."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"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."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"In the process of using data there is the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL). For extracting we are using another software, for transforming we are using our own coding in C#, and then we use Microsoft BI for loading the information. Microsoft BI displays information very well."
"The ease of integration and connectivity stands out as the most critical aspect, followed closely by the flexibility to customize reports and dashboards."
"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."
"Ability to extract data from a variety of sources and systems."
"Technical support is quite responsive."
"We encourage end users to use Power BI because it's quite easy for them to interact with the menus and the navigation bar. Even for ordinary users, they can create their own dashboard using Power BI."
"The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible."
"I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"It could have more options for themes."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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 AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. This is what Microsoft can work on."
"Microsoft Power BI can be confusing, because it has two languages that you need to learn if you want to use it, and this makes it more difficult for nontechnical users."
"From any improvement perspective, I want the product to be made available to users free of cost...The stability and scalability of the product can be better."
"I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint."
"It should be easier to use when there are multiple system sources."
"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"
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.