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.
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"It is a stable product."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"It's a pretty scalable product."
"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use."
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."
"This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"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."
"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's support could be better."
"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"It is not yet ready for enterprises. For a big enterprise data model, it is not so stable, and it also doesn't scale so well."
"The accounting data needs improvement."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"Technical support could be a bit better."
"I have found using Microsoft BI is not easy. For example, trying to use the auto-refresh feature is not simple."
"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."
"I would like to be able to use more predicting data science features without having to use R."
"I would like to see integration with Excel."
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.