Adaptive Insights vs IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Workday and IBM are both solutions in the Reporting category. Workday is ranked #26, while IBM is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.5. Workday holds a 1.5% mindshare in RT, compared to IBM’s 2.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

2,736 Views
602 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM Cognos

Read 140 IBM Cognos reviews

6,332 Views
2,469 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 329 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,257 Views
10,188 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

IBM Cognos

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Adaptive Insights, IBM Cognos, and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and others in Reporting.

To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

March 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 1.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Cognos is 2.9%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 17.4%, down from 27.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	17.4%
IBM Cognos	2.9%
Adaptive Insights	1.5%
Other	78.2%

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight

Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

Read full review

Rawen Lawrence

Senior Project Manager at BD

Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions

IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.

Read full review

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The system has allowed us to take more than 90 spreadsheets and combine them into one system which automatically calculates based on assumptions, dimensions, etc."

"The biggest feature is the source of truth for all of our budget and forecast versions."

"More accurate, reliable, and timely forecasting."

"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."

"Reduced planning and budgeting time - it takes hardly a couple of days to complete my entire budgeting exercise, uploading actual data and generating monthly reports with comparison of actual versus budgets in no time."

"Automated reporting."

"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."

"Automated reporting."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"As a consultant, I've had the pleasure of working with a very wide range of clients with very specific needs, and so far, Cognos has not failed to meet their needs and surpass their expectations."

"We are able to rapidly communicate financial reporting and statements for reconciliation purposes."

"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."

"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."

"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."

"It is a stable product."

"We have worked with several reporting software products, and Cognos has a lot of flexibility and is very usable."

"This solution has provided us with a single control tool, which allows us to easily provide reports for the different sections of our banking environment."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The product is scalable."

"With the out-of-the-box Data Platform and Business Intelligence ecosystem, you get the entire platform with a single license."

"It provides easy integration with Office tools."

"Helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management."

"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."

"It is easy to set up."

"The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"Discovery (the data visualization module): Needs to catch up with BI leaders, such as MS and Tableau."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"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."

"Almost all the time, we have a problem with Cognos stability and even our maintenance vendor can’t do anything to resolve it."

"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."

"One thing that can be improved is the time for troubleshooting and finding the root cause of the issues. Sometimes it takes only one day or a week, which is fine, however, sometimes it can take up to one or two months."

"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."

"What we have noticed is that it's lacking a few things which we want, especially on the visualization side of things."

"Accessibility to and flexibility of consolidation rules / logic: Products like HFM are much easier to work with when one needs to change rules, etc. With Cognos, I find that a regular user needs a much better understanding of the control tables and the E rules than a regular HFM user needs of the rules file."

More IBM Cognos cons

"It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use. For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that."

"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights."

"We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python."

"We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features."

"The BI reporting still relies on historical transactions."

"The significant drawback I notice is that Microsoft's size makes it hard to get specific change requests addressed unless they involve a bug."

"Defining a relationship was very confusing. There were circular directions for which I had to do a lot of adjustments in the data. They can do something to make it easier."

"I feel that scalability is one area where there is room for improvement. When there is a huge volume of data, like when we apply the aggregation, the reporting slows down."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."

"It's affordable."

"It is pretty expensive."

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."

"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."

"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."

"It is averagely priced."

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost."

"The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side."

"Microsoft BI is very cost-effective and this is why we use it."

"It's straightforward licensing."

"It is part of our Office 365 license."

"The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive."

"It is reasonably priced."

"I'm unsure about the exact cost, but the Pro license comes out to around $10 per user. There are also additional costs for custom visuals that you can pay for."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Financial Services Firm

13%

Insurance Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	23
Large Enterprise	92

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

Questions from the Community

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Seeking lightweight open source BI software

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...

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What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

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What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

One area where IBM Cognos can be improved is that customer service sometimes is not very responsive, and I would love...

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Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...

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Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...

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How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...

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Comparisons

Infor dEPM vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 9% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 6% of the time

Planful vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 5% of the time

Longview Analytics vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 5% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 4% of the time

More Adaptive Insights Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

SQL Server vs IBM Cognos

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

QlikView vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

March 2026

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

March 2026

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

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.”

IBM

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.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and others in Reporting. Updated: March 2026.

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