IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud comparison

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

• IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
  
  
• IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service enables organizations of all sizes to drive accurate, connected plans across your business and be prepared for what's next. Navigate uncertainty with scenario modeling. Leverage built-in best practices and predictive intelligence across finance, line of business, and operations.

Planning, Budgeting, and Forecasting

· Create decision-oriented plans: Make better decisions by creating goal-oriented, driver-based plans. Get immediate insight to your performance with interactive dashboards and reports and leverage predictive planning to recommend the best path forward.

· Connect your business: Connect every part of your business with a plan that is fully integrated across finance, operations, and lines of business. With connected planning, you can immediately analyze the impact of changes across your business.

· Do freeform modeling at scale: With Oracle Cloud EPM Freeform, model multiple complex financial and operational what-if scenarios with large-scale, freeform ad-hoc modeling. Use predictive planning features to validate assumptions and reduce the risk in your decisions.

Prepare for anything with Scenario Modeling

· Apply sophisticated financial intelligence: Leverage financial intelligence and other powerful, built-in features to rapidly model multiple scenarios to quickly deal with change.

· Support your decisions with Monte Carlo simulations: Use Monte Carlo simulations to determine the likelihood of various scenarios, giving you confidence in your decisions.

· Align strategy with plans: Understand the impact of strategic decisions across your bottom line, balance sheet, cash flow, and shareholder value before pushing to your operational plan.

· Optimize capital structure: Model different funding options and understand the impact your strategies will have on your credit rating and capital structure.

Retain top talent with workforce planning

· Plan for compensation expenses: Plan compensation-related expenses by employee, job code, or at a level of detail that makes sense for your business using out-of-the-box, driver-based planning.

· Align finance and HR: Build the workforce you need to execute on your strategic goals. Collaborate more with HR with prebuilt integration to Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) and integration with other third-party cloud HCM solutions.

· Leverage wizard-based planning for ease of use: Maintain complex employee expense calculations, such as benefits, tax expense, and others with easy-to-use planning wizards.

Plan your capital asset expenses

· Track the full lifecycle of capital investment: Create cashflow and funding plans for investments and leased assets. Also plan for new capital assets and take advantage of out-of-the-box calculations for depreciation and amortization during the lifespan of the asset.

· Plan asset-related expenses: Easily model asset-related expenses such as repairs and insurance. Automate processes such as retirements, transfers, and improvements.

· Plan for intangible assets: Plan for new and existing intangible assets, including amortization and cash flow planning and impairments.

· Review your capital expenses: Get an overall capital expense spending analysis, including asset summary reports, and actual versus plan variances. See the impact on cash flow, balance sheet, and income statement by asset class and business unit.

Understand the financial aspects of your projects

· Model all project types: Use out-of-the-box drivers to plan costs related to both short- and long-term projects. These include internal projects, such as IT, R&D, marketing campaigns, and contract-based projects or projects across more complex project-oriented industries, such as construction, engineering, and professional services.

· Plan detailed project costs and revenues: Understand the financial impact of your projects. Use drivers that help you plan for individual employee and asset-related costs, as well as expected revenues.

· Track project performance: Use prebuilt metrics to track project revenue, expenses, and cash flow. Leverage performance indicators such as net present value, payback, and return on investment.

Plan across all financial statements

· Optimize your revenue plan: Accurately plan revenue, sales, and gross margin by adding dimensions for specific drivers related to your business.

· Plan for all expenses: Plan for all of your expenses with prebuilt best-practice expense drivers. Include expenses from workforce and capital planning with prebuilt integration.

· Analyze the balance sheet: See the full picture by integrating balance sheets fully with income statements and cash flow. Configure for industry-specific requirements.

· Model your cash flow: Model cash from operations with fully integrated cash flow planning for short, medium, and long-term time horizons.

Integrated Business Planning and Execution (IBPx)

· Connect you planning, execution, finance and operations: Transform plans into execution and monitor activity to detect unexpected events using IoT, AI and prescriptive analytics. Simulate and evaluate alternative response to maintain or improve business targets.

· Reduce decision latency: Leverage real-time planning and execution details to act on negative trends faster and more effectively.

· Consolidated view across the entire process: Improve your short and long range strategic planning by seamlessly integrating planning and execution in to a single data model.

Empower finance to become data driven with IPM

IPM applies data science and machine learning to enable finance professionals to be more data driven, impacting key areas of the business, and take advantage of potential missed opportunities.

· Improve decisions with predictive planning: Identify and leverage patterns in your financial and operational data to improve accuracy. Run predictions on the latest actuals and factor those into your plans for more timely, objective decisions.

· Speed up data analysis to take faster action with Insights: Use embedded AI and machine learning (ML) to continually monitor your plans, forecasts, and variances, so you’ll be alerted about any anomalies, biases—as well as hidden correlations. Relevant insights now come straight to you, empowering you to take the right action in time.