We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."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."
"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."
"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."
"The product is user-friendly."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"They should add mobile access."
"Technical support has been great."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."
"They find Power BI's data pull mechanism to be sufficient and cost-effective, especially considering the stability it provides. In comparison with other solutions, Power BI stands out as a fantastic choice. Therefore, I would definitely recommend sticking with the Pro license."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud is ad hoc reporting."
"The most valuable feature is the data integration in Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud."
"We previously used Oracle EDS, and when comparing it to this solution, this solution has a much better interface. There are lots of advantages of the new solutions. Having it on the cloud, we are able to forget about keeping them updated or taking care of the database. We have minimal maintenance."
"The workforce, the cube database, is the most valuable feature where you do planning for your headcounts."
"The most valuable features of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud are the many capabilities it provides."
"Once you do the budget in Oracle ERP, you can upload it, but it's easier to create and manage budgets in the Oracle budgeting tool itself. For example, if you have a shortfall in the budget, it's easier to manage that and the forms, too, especially if you also have Oracle Forms Management. You can get the forms from somewhere and then transform those forms into budget heads."
"The tool improves the organizational budgeting process in several ways. One significant aspect is the extensionable functionality it offers. To illustrate, consider a scenario where a company has factories in Mexico producing Volkswagen and Kentucky producing Ford."
"The product has a direct plugin to Microsoft Excel."
"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."
"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."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"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."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"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."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality."
"The formatting template could be improved."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"The initial setup is a little bit technical."
"When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing. Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue. It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."
"It should be more user-friendly and simple."
"The FR recording studio that is used to build reports is clunky and awful to use. This could be improved a lot. The solution does have problems and limitations."
"For HR, the workforce planning out of the box is complicated. For most users, it's not easy, and it requires a learning curve. It's not very user-friendly. It can be improved."
"Some of the things in this product are just too cumbersome and we don't need them and they make it harder to do certain things, or certain things have to have more specific names or descriptions."
"The tool's interface is outdated. However, OneStream is easier to navigate."
"There is middleware that we need to purchase for our use case that should be provided in Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud. We should not have to purchase the additional solution and the integration should be seamless."
"Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud could improve. There are times when the forms are slow in saving and calculating."
"Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud could improve by having better integration with some other modules that we would add to this solution."
"One potential improvement would be a more visual workflow, as the current method using a tax list is not as effective."
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