Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #3 with an average rating of 7.1, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 8.3% mindshare in BIT, compared to Microsoft’s 23.0% mindshare. Additionally, 60% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

Amazon QuickSight and Microsoft Power BI are leading business intelligence tools competing for user preference. While Amazon QuickSight stands out for its cost-effectiveness, Microsoft Power BI is favored for its extensive feature set and comprehensive integration with other Microsoft products.

Features: Amazon QuickSight is known for efficient real-time data processing, straightforward setup, and interactive dashboard delivery. Microsoft Power BI is recognized for advanced analytics, seamless integration with Microsoft tools, and its powerful suite of features supporting complex data analytics.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest Amazon QuickSight could improve customization options, integration capabilities, and expand feature variety. Microsoft Power BI could enhance performance speed, handle large datasets better, and simplify certain advanced features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon QuickSight simplifies deployment with its intuitive setup and supportive performance framework. Microsoft Power BI requires more technical expertise in deployment but is backed by comprehensive documentation and a thorough support system.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon QuickSight is highlighted for competitive pricing and strong ROI, appealing to cost-sensitive projects. Microsoft Power BI, despite higher initial costs, is justified by users for strong ROI and significant business impact from its robust features.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.3%, down from 12.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 23.0%, up from 22.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

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 user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

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Anoop Jose

Senior Manager - Architecture and engineering excellence at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature

Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking. Especially for root cause analysis, the ability to drill down from a high-level problem to its root is crucial. Aside from that, QuickSight is a good service.

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Amol Rane

Solutions Architect M365 at Sogeti UK

Supports AI initiatives in terms of predictive analytics

The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins. So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."

"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."

"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."

"The initial setup is quite straightforward."

"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."

"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 correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."

More IBM Cognos pros

"Amazon QuickSight has introduced a new functionality called Q bar, which allows the user to do natural language queries and get additional insights using some built-in generative capabilities."

"Amazon QuickSight can provide insights from the available data. It supports various rule types. We get the options of machine learning and insights, which are not available in other intelligence tools. It is easier to use, more stable, and cheaper than other solutions."

"The ease with which it integrates with different data sources is most valuable. Especially when everything is on AWS, it is easy to connect to the data source and organize different dashboards."

"I like that with Amazon QuickSight, you don't need to install an app to use its services. With other BI tools, you need to install the app, so Amazon QuickSight is better for me in this area."

"It is fine for basic reporting."

"It is notably fast in handling large data set refreshes, making it efficient for data analysis."

"QuickSight makes it easy to provision, create, and publish dashboards."

"The solution is simple to implement."

More Amazon QuickSight pros

"It has provided customer purchase patterns and great visualization."

"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."

"Its data visualization provides the user the ability to quickly look at data and focus on relevant information, allowing them to make an immediate decision."

"We find the solution offers good stability."

"The solution is stable with reasonable performance."

"We have found that the reporting and publishing are great."

"Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data."

"Provides good data flow related to the container and control flow."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"The solution seems to slow down the servers."

"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."

"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."

"Need improvement towards Visualization."

"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."

"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."

"The solution's support could be better."

More IBM Cognos cons

"It should support integration with Python or R."

"There could be an end-to-end pipeline for data cleaning as well as presenting it using different visualizations."

"There is room for improvement in terms of the number of visualizations and dashboards that are available."

"They could provide more options for graphics and other features."

"The product is quite expensive because the price is too close to QlikView's prices but it does not ring as well as QlikView."

"It can be made more user-friendly as some users might find this solution hard to implement. Qlik Sense, for example, is very user-friendly."

"Amazon QuickSight has minimal features. The feature set can be improved to allow you to create good production-ready dashboards. This does not happen with QuickSite, it needs to mature to be used in production."

"Amazon QuickSight's visualization could be improved."

More Amazon QuickSight cons

"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."

"SSMS & SSRS."

"Microsoft BI could improve by allowing large-size data sources. We have large data sources, and we have problems loading them in Microsoft BI."

"Creating dashboards could be easier."

"It is not yet ready for enterprises. For a big enterprise data model, it is not so stable, and it also doesn't scale so well."

"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."

"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."

"There is room for improvement in terms of customization and configuration options, particularly for more advanced users."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is pretty expensive."

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."

"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."

"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing should be improved."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"It's affordable compared to other long-term contractor business tools available in the market."

"I rate the price of Amazon QuickSight a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."

"The standard edition is free to use for exploration purposes while the enterprise edition needs to be paid for. The pricing for this solution is very reasonable."

"The solution's pricing is cheaper than the other products in the market."

"The solution is not affordable."

"I'm using a paid version of Amazon QuickSight, paying about $22 monthly. As I have yet to learn about the pricing for other tools, such as Power BI, I won't be able to compare."

"It is simpler and cheaper than other solutions."

More Amazon QuickSight pricing and cost advice

"Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it."

"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."

"Microsoft Power BI has reasonable pricing."

"In the beginning, the solution cost approximately $1,000 per month, we have a Microsoft startup subscription. There is a subscription pack for startups company which we are able to have for one year."

"I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView."

"My company needs to make monthly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the product."

"If you purchase a license for a server, for users, or the professional version, you might not have to. The free version I think it can satisfy many customers' needs."

"There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

41%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

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What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?

The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?

Competition pricing is high for query processing, however, the Data Lake cost is nominal as it is on top of S3.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?

The cost of queries is very high. Improvements in drill-down ability and evolving it as an OLAP tool would help more.

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs IBM Cognos

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

Qlik Sense vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Tableau vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 20% of the time

Looker Studio vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 10% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 8% of the time

Looker vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 4% of the time

More Amazon QuickSight Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight

November 2024

Download Amazon QuickSight product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

November 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

QuickSight

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Learn More

IBM

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Microsoft

Overview

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.”

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Using our cloud-based service you can easily connect to your data, perform advanced analysis, and create stunning visualizations and rich dashboards that can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.

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.

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.

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Buyer's Guide

Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI

October 2024

Free Report: Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon QuickSight vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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