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."We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"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."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a small operation up to a gigantic operation. "
"Technical support has sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them."
"We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers."
"The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards."
"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."
"The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful."
"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."
"The implementation was fairly straightforward."
"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 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."
"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."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"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."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before."
"MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting."
"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."
"The learning curve is quite steep."
"We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up."
"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."
"We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better."
"The solution's licensing could be improved because its cost is heavy on the pockets."
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.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.