We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc."
"The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"I like the flexibility it offers."
"The solution is easy to use and flexible."
"Ability to extract data from a variety of sources and systems."
"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."
"Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau."
"I like that it's relatively stable."
"We're satisfied with the stability."
"The interface for building the queries or writing the store procedures is good."
"One of the things I most like about SQL Server is the log shipping piece. This is a great feature."
"We like business integration, database, and analysis."
"The interface is user friendly."
"It works fine in terms of performance and stability."
"The solution has proven to be very stable."
"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."
"The solution could improve by having more attractive graphical charts."
"Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market."
"If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization."
"You need to purchase upgraded support separately."
"The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side."
"It should have more integrations."
"The dashboard could be simplified."
"It would be great if we were able to run it on multiple operating systems and not only stick with Windows."
"SQL Server could be more robust than one of its competitors."
"For small-scale businesses, Microsoft could improve by removing some limits in SQL Express."
"The solution is lacking a compound index for comparing values."
"I want to see one improvement and this involves the replication between the DC and DR."
"We have had problems implementing a data warehouse using SQL Server."
"Scalability is an area that needs improvement, and the deployment is difficult, which why I'm looking for an appliance to deploy it in a much more scalable way."
"SQL Server could improve the integration with nonrational database solutions, such as MongoDB."