We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos and Microsoft BI based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI has a slight edge in this comparison. According to its reviewers, it is a more lightweight solution than IBM Cognos.
"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."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"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."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"My primary use is for view of the dashboard."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an easy-to-use tool."
"Microsoft BI is very easy to set up and use."
"I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."
"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."
"Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes."
"Being able to transfer data with the Power Query feature is great for teaching with about one to two hundred rows of data. I am also able to see the relationship between multiple tables and create various sheets and dashboards."
"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"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."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
"Our expectation is putting BI to work in real-time data collection systems in the maritime environment."
"Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution."
"There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide describing the visual."
"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."
"Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop."
"SSMS & SSRS."
"Power BI could have better metadata management. It's easy to use for a single person. However, it lacks an enterprise-grade metadata management system, which can be a problem if you're doing an enterprise deployment with multiple users."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 132 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 297 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. 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 Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". IBM Cognos is most compared with Oracle OBIEE, Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and Amazon QuickSight, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. See our IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
See our list of best Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all Reporting 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.