We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and QlikView based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"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."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"Power BI allows you to create user defined charts which is really useful."
"I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use."
"This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."
"If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful."
"I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty easy."
"The most useful feature of QlikView for me is the QVD concept."
"We can scale it if we need to."
"The language support is very good."
"The search feature: ability to see the related data."
"QlikView is one of the strongest tools, I would say. Also, it has a very vast capability to process the data"
"This solution has simplified getting to and understanding our data, no matter where it is housed."
"The most valuable feature of QlikView is the integration with other third-party tools."
"Our Qlikview applications help us to get a good idea of our Client Base Performance and assist us in the decision making for Seasonal Specials. On the other hand QlikView helps us to get a grasp on our Suppliers and helps us to negotiate pricing with them."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"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 solution seems to slow down the servers."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"This solution is resource-heavy."
"When it comes to improvement, I would say there could be more tutorials for students in universities who are just learning it. And it wouldn't have to be just for students in universities. It might also be for the people who use it in the real world."
"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"Integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved."
"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."
"The data source definition is all over the place."
"It needs work with visualization."
"Scalability really depends on the size of your data and QlikView server architecture. For the biggest data sets, it could become an issue at some point."
"Better source data connectors."
"Though the initial setup phase is simple, when it comes to the integration with the custom systems, the configuration and the compatibility sometimes take some more time."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of a feature that would allow us to add a common library of (our) commands used in load scripts and expressions, so with a keyword, we would get a drop down to select the command we are looking for, as opposed to the generic help."
"If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlik view's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve."
"There is a challenge on the frontend when it comes to browsing data through QlikView, as it isn't entirely compatible with other platforms we use."
"The user interface is old."
