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IBM Cognos vs Power BI Embedded Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Power BI Embedded Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
30th
Ranking in Reporting
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

RL
Senior Project Manager at BD
Data insights have transformed reporting speed and support faster, informed decisions
IBM Cognos makes it simple to create visually appealing products, and we are able to run about 1,000 reports on a daily basis while another 1,000 are run through the scheduler built into IBM Cognos Analytics. It offers triggering through the scheduler, which we use to confirm the completion of other processes needed to be available before the job is scheduled to run, allowing us to make data-driven decisions easily. Some of the best features that IBM Cognos offers are enterprise reporting, which enables us to create, customize, and run reports on sales trends, consumer sentiment, and many more; dashboard creation; and data exploration and analysis. We are able to use the drag and drop feature to create ad-hoc visualizations. Additionally, I find the AI-powered natural language query feature for data analysis and dashboard input to be very useful for a non-technical person to put queries around the spreadsheets data to get a quick answer. Building insights for accurate decision-making has been great. Moreover, we can package reports with data-backed insights for stakeholders in PDF and Excel format to support business ad-hoc cases, forecasting, and strategic recommendations on relevant tasks. Of all those features, the visual graphs, predictive analytics, and data cleansing feature makes the biggest difference for my team. IBM Cognos is deployed in my organization using a hybrid cloud setup with Amazon Web Services as our cloud provider.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai
Embedded analytics has unified diverse data sources and supports real-time operational decisions
I find Power BI Embedded Analytics to be a fairly good reporting tool and dashboarding tool. The color palette and everything about it is good. It would be beneficial to have reporting on top of a data warehouse, a lake house, or directly on an Excel-based solution. If Power BI can come as a full stack similar to SAP Analytics Cloud, it can embed with Azure very quickly. However, the full suite provided by SAP, starting from ERP through reporting, is somewhat loosely coupled, which can be helpful for some clients. Overall, Power BI is a very good tool for reporting. Embedded analytics may lack some features from the modeling perspective, such as dimension modeling, and there are multiple factors that lead us to prefer analytics on top of the warehouse rather than going for embedded analytics.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"I love the new user interface! Finally, Cognos BI has a new face."
"It is an enterprise level solution for BI that holds value in a traditional BI sense."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."
"The positive impact Power BI Embedded Analytics has made in my organization is the gain of time, the sharing of the same data, and the same information for all the stakeholders, leading to better decisions."
"What I appreciate most about Power BI Embedded Analytics is that it is tightly integrated with Microsoft, which is a strong feature."
 

Cons

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting similar to Excel, where you can conditionally format based on colour."
"IBM Cognos could be improved by integrating more with artificial intelligence."
"Replacement for VVM is still giving us issues."
"It is struggling to compete with the front-end ease of use and visual appeal of QlikView and Tableau."
"I believe IBM Cognos can be improved by addressing its limited real-time data connectivity, as well as enhancing the endpoint experience and mobility, which currently is not satisfactory due to limited data blending."
"Metadata documentation could be improved. While IBM Cognos tools allow you to document most aspects of the metadata layer, the way this information is stored and exposed for metadata management is too basic."
"I rate pricing as a four, meaning it is more expensive compared to other solutions."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Embedded analytics may lack some features from the modeling perspective, such as dimension modeling, and there are multiple factors that lead us to prefer analytics on top of the warehouse rather than going for embedded analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"It is averagely priced."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Insurance Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Computer Software Company
24%
Media Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise24
Large Enterprise92
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
Regarding improvements for IBM Cognos, I think nothing yet about functionality, but I find the costs to be quite high for the enterprise system. However, since we need it, we continue to renew our ...
What is your primary use case for IBM Cognos?
My main use case for IBM Cognos at my place of work is primarily for business intelligence (BI), mostly for serving, and we appreciate it because it covers the full BI stack, including dashboards, ...
What needs improvement with Power BI Embedded Analytics?
Power BI Embedded Analytics is perfect right now as they continuously introduce new features, though it would be beneficial if they included an artificial intelligence assistant in the DAX syntax t...
What is your primary use case for Power BI Embedded Analytics?
My main use case for Power BI Embedded Analytics is that in my day-to-day work, I use Power Query to prepare data and Power BI Embedded Analytics Desktop, spending my time all day to create visuals...
What advice do you have for others considering Power BI Embedded Analytics?
An example of a decision our team made because of a Power BI Embedded Analytics report is when we decided to focus on selling a unique numeric product and avoid selling the physical product after u...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Power BI Embedded Analytics and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.