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.
"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."
"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."
"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"The solution's initial setup process is easy."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"It is a stable product."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"It provides good visibility."
"I've seen no issues with BI's stability."
"You don't need much support with Microsoft Power BI because it has such a large base of users who can answer your questions on their forums. There are also many video tutorials and webinars available online that offer solutions to whatever problems you may have."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do."
"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."
"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."
"Power BI stands out because it provides considerable flexibility in creating reports, dashboards, and various types of analytics to meet those dynamic requirements. It is lightweight and easy to use with good support."
"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"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."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"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."
"It could have more options for themes."
"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. Compared to one of its competitors: Tableau, there are a lot of things which you cannot do in this tool, that can be done in Tableau."
"Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data."
"here are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs."
"The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version."
"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."
"The reporting needs to be improved."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting with 16 reviews while Microsoft BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 83 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.2, while Microsoft BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Cognos writes "Helpful online community, highly reliable, and secure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft BI writes "User friendly, easy to set up and great for analyzing data". IBM Cognos is most compared with Tableau, Oracle OBIEE, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Oracle Hyperion and MicroStrategy, whereas Microsoft BI is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, KNIME, Domo and SAS Visual Analytics. See our IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft 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.
