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IBM Cognos vs Infor dEPM vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Business Performance Management
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AMOL JAJU - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers ad hoc analysis reports and good for operational dashboarding
There used to be many valuable features, but in the last three or four years, whatever IBM is doing with enhancements, it has taken a lot of time to build and develop. But the best usage of Cognos is the ad hoc analysis reports. I really like that. Our customers also like that. But now the usage of Cognos and OBIE is reduced by various business users because people and business users are now more focused on analytics, slice and dice, and the dashboard, and the widgets.
Dietmar Müller - PeerSpot reviewer
Customizable features streamline installation and integration challenges remain
Our company is a partner of Infor in Germany. We mainly use Infor DEPM for finance solutions Infor DEPM has features that are well-prepared by Infor. I do not need to have my own tools; I only need to customize many elements. This makes it easier to install and work with. With the prepared…
Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."
"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."
"Infor dEPM's got the best end-user reporting solution that keeps us motivated and moving forward with this solution only."
"I do not need to have my own tools; I only need to customize many elements."
"The planning capability is the most valuable feature."
"All our customers have experienced a return on investment, as they have been included on the list of calls."
"You can get the data directly from the database with Excel formulas."
"Our customers have the solution deployed on the cloud or on-premises. The deployment took about a month."
"We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding."
"There was a lot of manual work involved with Excel, whereas once we moved on to Microsoft Power BI, it was a cleaner dashboard and it was faster too."
"The most valuable aspect of Microsoft Power BI in my field is the insights it provides from analyzing data. Sometimes, these insights go beyond what traditional analysis can reveal due to the large volume of data involved. In terms of improving our data analysis process, it starts with identifying data sources, followed by cleaning and filtering out irrelevant data. Then, we categorize and structure the data to achieve the best visualization and insights. Regarding Power BI's integration with other tools, although we haven't implemented it ourselves, it's known that Power BI can integrate with systems like SAP or ERP software, which could enhance our analytics capabilities if needed."
"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau."
"The product is scalable."
 

Cons

"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"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."
"There are questions about how Infor DEPM can be used with other solutions and the difficulties in connecting it with other software solutions. Integration is a concern."
"The latest version has been cloud-enabled, but it requires a deeper understanding of programming skills compared to the previous versions, which were more user-friendly."
"The initial setup from a user perspective can be cumbersome and has room for improvement."
"It's a very expensive solution."
"The usability could be better."
"There are questions about how Infor DEPM can be used with other solutions and the difficulties in connecting it with other software solutions."
"Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop."
"If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users."
"The solution could improve by providing more free visuals. A lot of them are very nice but you have to purchase them."
"I have observed issues regarding stability."
"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."
"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"
"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. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes."
"The mobile app is very poor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."
"It is averagely priced."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"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."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"It's a very expensive product, and I would rate it at nine out of ten, with ten being the most expensive. There are yearly licensing costs."
"While the licensing cost of Infor dEPM may be costly, it is still more affordable than SAP BusinessObjects EPM, for example."
"The pricing is competitive."
"Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge."
"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."
"We are end-users, and we don't take care of the prices and accounting. We get a product and pay the fee to our internal service provider, but its price should be reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it."
"The costs are small and the benefits are high."
"Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market."
"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."
"We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free."
"The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
15%
Non Profit
11%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
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.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
There is room for improvement in self-service analytics and predictiveness.
What needs improvement with Infor dEPM?
From my perspective, I think Infor dEPM is a good solution for clients who want to deep dive into data analysis in fi...
What is your primary use case for Infor dEPM?
With Infor dEPM, I usually recommend it for finance, insurance companies, oil and gas companies, and hospitality indu...
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...
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...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Infor Dynamic Enterprise Performance Management, Infor PM
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
DAB Group
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, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: August 2025.
865,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.