We performed a comparison between IBM Cognos, Microsoft Power BI, and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"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."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."
"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."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools."
"In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"It is easy to work with and very chic."
"The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible."
"I like the downloadable visualizations a lot. I think that they give the user a very nice starting point in creating awesome dashboards, with the right way to tell their data story."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"The interface is very fluid."
"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."
"The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it."
"I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool."
"The planning and dashboarding features have been useful. Additionally, the fixed-format reports are good."
"The solution is stable."
"It is solid and stable."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
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"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."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."
"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."
"The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files."
"The data source definition is all over the place."
"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's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users."
"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."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"The reporting needs to be improved."
"My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective. It should also be improved in terms of end-user experience. It requires further improvements for usability and ease of use. It should have more dashboarding metrics and much faster integration with ERP so that when you double click, you can instantly see the scenario-based result."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"The UI could be updated a bit."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense."
"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
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