IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Analytics Cloud comparison

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.”

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.

Oracle Analytics is a complete platform with ready-to-use services for a wide variety of workloads and data.

Oracle Analytics allows businesses to add AI and machine learning capabilities to any application—and as part of our integrated suite of cloud services to comply with data security and connected without disrupting business operations.

Offering valuable, actionable insights from all types of data—in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid deployment—Oracle Analytics empowers business users, data engineers, and data scientists to access and process relevant data, evaluate predictions, and make quick, accurate decisions.

Oracle Analytics Cloud Features

Oracle Analytics Cloud has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Intelligent search
• Smart data discovery
• Smart data preparation
• Natural language
• Auto suggest
• Visualization
• Dashboarding
• Global transformation policies
• Smart collaboration
• Integrated data science
• Enterprise architecture and security
• Platform extensibility
• Smart data connectors
  

Oracle Analytics Cloud Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Oracle Analytics Cloud. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Flexibility: Oracle Analytics Cloud gives you the flexibility to grow and change as your business does. At the same time, it puts you in complete control of your analytics environment by allowing you to analyze data and accommodate changing demand easily.

• Scalable: Oracle Analytics Cloud is a single, centralized solution that provides everything you need in a scalable environment to support varied user requirements for your organization right now and in the future as well.

• Comprehensive analytics: With Oracle Analytics Cloud, existing services are combined with new ones to deliver comprehensive analytics in the cloud. It provides everything you need for analytic agility, from fast, fluid self-service discovery to data loading and blending, inline data prep, data enrichment, automatic visualizations, data storytelling, and more.

• Cost-effectiveness: The solution is cost-effective and reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO).
  
• Innovation: Use the latest data analytics technologies, such as AI, machine learning, and natural language processing. Oracle Analytics has been recognized by industry experts for its innovations and robust architecture.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Oracle Analytics Cloud solution.

Fabricio Q., Data Analytics Manager, says, “The main functionality is great and everything is pretty standard and easy to use. It's great for consolidation and creating one source of truth. The initial setup is pretty straightforward.”

PeerSpot user, Eric B., Independent Consultant - Oracle BI Applications at Desjardins, mentions “It's really an enterprise solution. It has standard dashboarding functionality. It also has reporting capabilities for producing pixel-perfect reports, bursting large volumes of a document if you need to. It has interactive data discovery functionality, which you would use to explore your data, bring your own data, and merge it with maybe the data from an enterprise data warehouse to get new insights from the pre-existing data. It has machine learning embedded in the solution.”

Gaurav S., Vice President Credit Risk Management at a financial services firm, explains, “From a financial or bank perspective, this product is secure enough. The dashboards, analytics, visualizations, and different reports are valuable for business analytics. The AI/ML enablement is useful, as many reporting tools do not offer machine learning models as of now, without writing customized code.”

Another reviewer, Trinh P., Delivery Manager at Sift Ag, comments, "The specific capability I find important in Oracle Analytics Cloud is that it allows the basic user to easily drag and drop data. I also like that the solution allows the user to decide what to measure and what to see in the reports."