We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and MicroStrategy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"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."
"It is a stable product."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"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."
"I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday."
"MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic."
"The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good."
"The solution has excellent features available on mobile."
"The ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good."
"The mobile for MicroStrategy is the best of all the BI platforms. As a separate product for the mobile device, MicroStrategy is the entire BI platform. It is an enterprise solution, a separate unit, etc."
"Semi-automatic support of implementing date dimensions, including delta to prior year implementation."
"You can build once and deploy to multiple operating systems. Also, it resizes in the way you want it to."
"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."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"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."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do."
"I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing."
"It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy."
"The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation."
"Getting our data to work with the tool is where we are having issues."
"We did have issues with stability, and that was because we were co-located with another business unit, and we outgrew them on the unit. So we had to get to a separate physical instance."
"Preparation, data loading and data management application is challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics or MMA deployment."
"The UI seems klutzy with its manual entry."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 132 reviews while MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 155 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while MicroStrategy is rated 8.2. 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 MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". IBM Cognos is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and IBM Planning Analytics, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE. See our IBM Cognos vs. MicroStrategy report.
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