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 three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless compared to Cognos."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"Microsoft BI's most valuable feature is flexibility."
"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."
"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."
"There are some small features that are missing. It would be nice if the graphics were better. You can use external sources for charts, but it's quite complex to use and not easy to implement. If you want a new chart, you can download it from multiple tools and implement it into IBM Cognos."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."
"I cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project."
"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."
"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."
"It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use. For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that."
"The upgrade process could be improved."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
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.
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