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 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."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"The architecture is very solid."
"This solution has allowed us to become a top-class competitor among other consulting companies."
"We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform, like MicroStrategy provides, because it is easier. The customer gets used to one type of tool, then sticks with it."
"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."
"MicroStrategy's best feature is that it is a user-friendly tool."
"Has a great semantic layer."
"You can build once and deploy to multiple operating systems. Also, it resizes in the way you want it to."
"It was easy to install and implement a report with it."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"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."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"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."
"Training would be an area that they could improve upon."
"It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it."
"Needs more visualizations out-of-the-box."
"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."
"MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support."
"Getting our data to work with the tool is where we are having issues."
"When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry."
"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."
IBM Cognos is ranked 7th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 131 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 SAP Analytics Cloud, 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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