Microsoft Power BI vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

The compared Microsoft and SAS solutions aren't in the same category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 7.9, and holds a 22.4% mindshare in the category. SAS is ranked #9 in DV , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 5.1% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of SAS users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and SAS Visual Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics Report (Updated: January 2022).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics

January 2022

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Data Visualization

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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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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Robert Heck

Co Owner at Hecht und Heck GmbH

A great solution for big organizations, complex business requirements, and highly sophisticated and specialized statistics

There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else. For instance the system does not come with a pre-defined accounting, budgeting or planning model for a particular industry. Some competitors come with such a model (e.g. for retail companies) which makes the implementation of course easier if the customer can comproise with this predefined model. SAS does not provide such models but does not demand customers to comply with a foreign business model.

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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 initial setup is very straightforward."

"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."

"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."

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

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

"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling 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."

"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."

More IBM Cognos pros

"It's user-friendly and provides data abstracting capabilities. We are also able to share reports with our colleagues very easily."

"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."

"Real-time refresh is quite interesting and user-friendly, provided you have access to a gateway. It works well."

"It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs."

"The most useful features are the ability to connect different databases to Microsoft BI and explore them. Once the database information has been extracted, you have the ability to construct indicators and dashboards from the information."

"PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions."

"The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."

"Helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"The technical support services are good."

"Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools."

"It's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports."

"What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes."

"I like SAS Visual Analytics for its ability to provide an initial understanding of data through exploration, even before deep analytics."

"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."

"We've found the product to be stable and reliable."

"Great for handling complex data models."

More SAS Visual Analytics pros

Cons

"The solution seems to slow down the servers."

"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."

"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."

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

"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."

"They should provide improved visual reporting."

"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."

"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."

More IBM Cognos cons

"Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do more in-depth analysis and represent the findings."

"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."

"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."

"The solution should increase the API functionality so that we can use Microsoft Power BI for other purposes and aggregate things."

"They asked you to pay if you want to synchronize more than eight times, you would have to go to a Power BI enterprise license, which is much more costly."

"The maps in Power BI could be improved. You deal with many maps over the years, like maps of America and Saudi Arabia. The maps aren't detailed enough, and there aren't enough visualization tools. Whenever I want to use a map, I struggle with choosing the right visualization."

"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."

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

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"There are certain shortcomings in the tool's support services, making it an area where improvements are required."

"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."

"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."

"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."

"The licensing ends up being more expensive than other options."

"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."

"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."

"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."

More SAS Visual Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"It is pretty expensive."

"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."

"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."

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."

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

"It is averagely priced."

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."

"The costs are small and the benefits are high."

"I'm unsure about the exact cost, but the Pro license comes out to around $10 per user. There are also additional costs for custom visuals that you can pay for."

"I used the tool's free version."

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."

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

"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."

"I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The product is expensive."

"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."

"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."

"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."

"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."

"The product is quite expensive."

"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."

"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."

More SAS Visual Analytics 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

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

20%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

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.

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 version...

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

What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?

The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?

It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?

Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types. Furthermore, Exce...

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 3% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 25% of the time

Databricks vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 13% of the time

Dataiku vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs SAS Visual Analytics

Compared 2% of the time

More SAS Visual Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

December 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

December 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

SAS Visual Analytics

November 2024

Download SAS Visual Analytics 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

SAS BI

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IBM

Microsoft

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SAS

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.

SAS Visual Analytics is a data visualization tool that is used for reporting, data exploration, and analytics. The solution enables users - even those without advanced analytical skills - to understand and examine patterns, trends, and relationships in data. SAS Visual Analytics makes it easy to create and share reports and dashboards that monitor business performance. By using the solution, users can handle, understand, and analyze their data in both past and present fields, as well as influence vital factors for future changes. SAS Visual Analytics is most suitable for larger companies with complex needs.

SAS Visual Analytics Features

SAS Visual Analytics has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Data
Interactive data discovery
Augmented analytics
Chat-enabled analytics
Sharing and collaboration
Visual analytics apps
Embedded insights
Location analytics
Security and administration
In-memory engine

SAS Visual Analytics Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing SAS Visual Analytics. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Machine learning and natural language: SAS Visual Analytics uses machine learning and natural language explanations to find, visualize, and narrate stories and insights that are easy to understand and explain. This enables you to find out why something happened, examine all options, and uncover opportunities hidden deep in your data.

Easy and efficient reporting: With SAS Visual Analytics, you can create interactive reports and dashboards so you can quickly summarize key performance metrics and share them via the web and mobile devices.

Easy to use: SAS Visual Analytics was designed to be easy to use. Its easy-to-use predictive analytics enables even business analysts to assess possible outcomes, which also helps organizations make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Self-service data: Self-service data preparation gives users the ability to import their own data, join tables, create calculated columns, apply data quality functions, and more. In turn, the solution empowers users to access, combine, clean, and prepare their own data in an agile way, which helps facilitate faster, broader adoption of analytics for your entire organization.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SAS Visual Analytics solution.

A Senior Manager at a consultancy says, “The solution is very stable. The scalability is good. The usability is quite good. It's quite easy to learn and to progress with SAS from an end-user perspective.

PeerSpot user Robert H., Co-owner at Hecht und Heck GmbH, comments, “What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes.

Andrea D., Chief Technical Officer at Value Partners, explains, “The best feature is that SAS is not a single BI tool. Rather, it is part of an ecosystem of tools, such as tools that help a user to develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on. SAS is an ecosystem. It's an ecosystem of products. We've found the product to be stable and reliable. The scalability is good.”

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

Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics

January 2022

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics and other solutions. Updated: January 2022.

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