IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

IBM and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. IBM is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.2, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9. IBM holds a 3.8% mindshare in BIT, compared to Microsoft’s 22.4% mindshare. Additionally, 91% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

IBM Cognos

Read 134 IBM Cognos reviews

7,418 Views
3,983 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 315 Microsoft Power BI reviews

26,611 Views
21,628 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM Cognos

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024

IBM Cognos and Microsoft Power BI are competitive solutions in the business intelligence category. Power BI appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced features and overall deployment experience, while Cognos remains strong in pricing and customer service.

Features: IBM Cognos provides powerful reporting tools, efficient historical data analysis, and good customer support. Microsoft Power BI is recognized for real-time data visualization, interactive dashboards, and effective collaboration tools.

Room for Improvement: IBM Cognos could enhance data integration flexibility, simplify set-up processes, and improve user interface intuitiveness. Microsoft Power BI users suggest better handling of large data sets, improvements in processing speed, and extended compatibility with diverse data formats.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Cognos offers strong customer support during deployment but is considered complex in its setup. Microsoft Power BI provides an efficient deployment process and reliable customer service, making it favorable for users seeking easy implementation.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Cognos is appreciated for competitive initial setup costs and strong ROI in the long-term. Microsoft Power BI, although having higher initial costs, offers excellent ROI thanks to its superior analytics capabilities. Its pricing aligns with its extensive feature set, enhancing decision-making based on data.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI

November 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 823,795 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

7th

Ranking in Reporting

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

134

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

315

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.4%, up from 22.4% 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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."

"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."

"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."

"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."

"A drag-and-drop interface for selecting creating ad hoc reports makes this product very easy to use."

"The dashboarding offered by this solution is very valuable to us."

"We use the account statement report. When you use an account in HSBC, you receive various types of accounts, such as the stock market, fixed accounts, credit cards, and business accounts. We can create one consolidated report called CCS support, which includes all these accounts. In that statement, we are consolidating all those accounts."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."

"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."

"Data integration enabled my organization to easily pool data from our varied system into one data warehouse."

"It is a pretty straightforward and flexible solution for data integration and modeling. It is a low-code solution. When you are doing data integration, you can use the GUI, which is very simple and straightforward. You can also do very intricate custom queries and model it at different levels. It is very easy to use and scalable."

"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."

"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."

"What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable."

"I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."

"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."

"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."

"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."

More IBM Cognos cons

"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."

"Our expectation is putting BI to work in real-time data collection systems in the maritime environment."

"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."

"The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."

"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."

"In an upcoming release, the solution could be simplified and have a more complete product package rather than a suite of products that we have to put together."

"The data source definition is all over the place."

"They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing should be improved."

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"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."

"It is averagely priced."

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

"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."

"It is pretty expensive."

"The pricing of this product is meant for medium to large-scale enterprises."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"Regarding cost, the initial investment wasn't too high, but ongoing licensing could add up."

"The pricing is reasonable."

"We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate."

"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."

"I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable."

"Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost."

"Power BI's price is reasonable, especially if you can put it in some bigger package and use it with other products. The value of a solution doesn't just come from its features as a standalone product. The price should also reflect how easy it's to set up, clean data, and integrate with other solutions."

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

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

42%

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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

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 f...

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 would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

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 information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

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 fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% 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

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Workday Prism Analytics vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

December 2024

Download IBM Cognos 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

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

Learn More

IBM

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.”

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.

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

IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI

November 2024

Free Report: IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: November 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI report.

See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Reporting vendors.

We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.