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.
"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'."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"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 correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"The best feature for me is Power Query. I know that probably sounds strange, but you can't do too much with visuals and reports if the backend stuff is horribly dirty and just bad. But for me, that is absolutely fantastic. I can load the data and do the transformation and be able to load it in a useful way. There are tons of connections, which is absolutely fantastic as well. It's been fairly easy, and it's intuitive."
"It is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow."
"The data can be accessed from anywhere."
"I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool."
"Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The solution's support could be better."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"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."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"The solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports."
"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."
"It is easy enough. I don't see any real substantial improvements that are needed. It is great as it is, but its interface could be a bit modern."
"The formatting template could be improved."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"If you need data in real-time, it's not an ideal solution."
"I would like to see some AI incorporated into this solution in the future."
"Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop."
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.