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 most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"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."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"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."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"It seems stable. I haven't heard of any difficulties from my clients that utilize Power BI."
"The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible."
"They should add mobile access."
"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."
"We have found the solution to be stable."
"Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"I'm missing collaborations functionality to operate or to work connected with multiple people on a data source or on virtualization. There should be more collaborations functions, such as in Confluence. We haven't explored the solution sufficiently in this area, but at this time it doesn't look sufficient."
"A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement."
"Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS."
"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."
"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."
"One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes."
"The setup took a lot of tinkering with InfoSec to allow us to do stuff."
"The solution could improve by having more attractive graphical charts."
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.