"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"IBM Cognos improves the effectiveness of the sales team."
"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."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable."
"The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible."
"Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features."
"Technical support is quite good."
"The initial setup is simple to do."
"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."
"It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on."
"It would be nice to offer free online training on the tool for end-users."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"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."
"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"The DAX in Microsoft BI is quite difficult."
"There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide describing the visual."
"The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side."
"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."
"There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you."
"There are some limitations in Power BI; you have to work in the Power BI base. However, if you want something not out-of-the-box and you want something custom, you have to do a lot of work."
"The solution could be quicker at rendering data."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
IBM Cognos is ranked 4th in Reporting Tools with 18 reviews while Microsoft BI is ranked 1st in Reporting Tools with 188 reviews. IBM Cognos is rated 8.0, 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 "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 Tableau, Qlik Sense, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, MicroStrategy and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Microsoft BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, MicroStrategy, Oracle OBIEE and Domo. See our IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft BI report.
See our list of best Reporting Tools vendors and best Business Intelligence (BI) Tools vendors.
We monitor all Reporting Tools 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.
