We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and SAP Crystal Reports based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"A positive feature is Report Studio, where we create beautiful, complex reports."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"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."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."
"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"The data can be accessed from anywhere."
"It's a very easy-to-use solution."
"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."
"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."
"Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable."
"I find Crystal Reports very easy to use, even for a non-technical person."
"We use SAP Crystal Reports for operational reporting."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a fantastic way of generating reports."
"The initial setup of the solution is pretty easy."
"The most valuable feature is that from a user's point of view, it is easy to use and requires just a simple click to generate a report."
"It is an user-friendly solution."
"SAP Crystal Reports offers a plethora of features, many of which were available much earlier than in the Crystal Reports we previously used. We extensively use its capabilities for generating general reports, working with Kaspersky data, and even incorporating images into our reports. The range of functions available in SAP Crystal Reports is diverse, and we leverage them across various systems for our needs."
"Compared to Tableau and PowerBI, the IBM interface is easier to use. However, the drag-and-drop functionality isn't as straightforward. Formatting is also more challenging in the cloud than in other applications, like Power BI. Also, if you encounter an issue, it takes more time to resolve it on the formatting side."
"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
"They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"Powerpoints are not available in the report server."
"It should have more report outputs. They should expand the report outputs. Its documentation should also be better."
"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."
"Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way."
"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."
"There could be improvements made to the analytics capabilities."
"The financing part needs improvement."
"SAP Crystal Reports should provide better support for dynamic connectors."
"It has significantly enhanced security features, especially when compared to the standard security features of the earlier PeerSpot version I purchased. I've observed improvements in security, and overall, it's quite commendable. Regarding potential enhancements for the next release of this solution, I haven't closely examined SAP Crystal Reports 53. I've only encountered it briefly, perhaps once or twice. However, I anticipate that it likely offers advanced features distinct from its predecessor. I believe there may be notable improvements and additions in the latest version, and I look forward to exploring them further."
"SAP Crystal Reports has some compatibility issues with third-party products."
"A real improvement would be a simpler system that allows users to play with the visualization without needing specialized skills and code."
"If at all possible, a little bit of improvement on the analytical side is needed."
