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."Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"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."
"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."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."
"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."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"MicroStrategy's solution for mobile is very good."
"In the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. Now, it's a seamless integration. We can connect directly, in the form of In-Memory Cubes or live-publish cubes, to the data warehouse, and blend in the data with big data. Not only relational databases, but we can also integrate other third-party files, and create a single-source software."
"I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability."
"Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a small operation up to a gigantic operation. "
"Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day. We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us."
"We leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting."
"In terms of functionality, MicroStrategy is alright. It's a solid BI tool and can handle most tasks you'd expect."
"We are embedding multimedia content in our apps... You can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"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."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"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."
"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"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."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design."
"Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better."
"I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there."
"It needs row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out."
"The learning curve is quite steep."
"One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs."
"I would like to see more integration."
"We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time."
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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