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 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."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"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."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things."
"The drill-down functionality is also very good."
"It has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements."
"The data governance leads people to trust the data that they have, and they know where to get it."
"We've made it an open BI platform, so that all our business analysts can build their own dashboards and Dossiers."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build reports, then customize for different groups instead of having to build multiple reports. Therefore, the ability to build customization in the reports for different groups."
"It is easy to use and visually very appealing. One thing that sets it apart is that it has got a great ETL tool. As compared to some of the other solutions, it is much easier to process data from other applications in MicroStrategy. That's why we prefer using it."
"Stability is great, especially with package deployments. It is very consistent and stable."
"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."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"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."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"We had some problems with customer service and support."
"I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there."
"They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that."
"They need to do a better job In its ability to allow end users to produce their own reports, metrics, and self-service business intelligence."
"When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry."
"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."
"MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support."
"Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience."
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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