Cognos vs. Power BI: 2024 Data Platform Comparison

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IBM Cognos Analytics and Microsoft Power BI are two of the top business intelligence (BI) and data analytics software options on the market today.

Both of these application and service suites are in heavy demand, as organizations seek to harness real-time repositories of big data for various enterprise use cases, including artificial intelligence and machine learning model development and deployment.

When choosing between two of the most highly regarded data platforms on the market, users often have difficulty differentiating between Cognos and Power BI and weighing each of the platform’s pros and cons. In this in-depth comparison guide, we’ll compare these two platforms across a variety of qualities and variables to assess where their strengths lie.

But first, here’s a glance at the areas where each tool excels most:

• Cognos Analytics: Best for advanced data analytics and on-premises deployment. Compared to Power BI, Cognos is particularly effective for advanced enterprise data analytics use cases that require more administrative controls over security and governance. Additionally, it is more reliable when it comes to processing large quantities of data quickly and accurately.
• Power BI: Best for affordable, easy-to-use, integrable BI technology in the cloud. Compared to Cognos Analytics, Power BI is much more versatile and will fit into the budget, skill sets, and other requirements of a wider range of teams. Most significant, this platform offers free access versions that are great for teams that are just getting started with this type of technology.

Cognos vs. Power BI at a Glance

What Is Cognos?

Cognos Analytics is a business intelligence suite of solutions from IBM that combines AI-driven assistance, advanced reporting and analytics, and other tools to support various enterprise data management requirements. The platform is available both in the cloud and on demand for on-premises and custom enterprise network configurations.

With its range of features, Cognos enables users to connect, verify, and combine data and offers plenty of dashboard and visualization options. Cognos is particularly good at pulling and analyzing corporate data, providing detailed reports, and assisting in corporate governance. It is built on a strong data science foundation and is supported by heavy-duty analytics and recommendations, courtesy of IBM Watson.

Also see: Top Business Intelligence Software

Key Features of Cognos

• AI-driven insights: The platform benefits from veteran AI support in the form of Watson, which helps with data visualization design, dashboard builds, forecasting, and data explainability. This is particularly helpful for users with limited data science and coding experience who need to pull in-depth analyses from complex datasets.
• Data democratization through natural language: Advanced natural language capabilities make it possible for citizen data scientists and less-experienced tech professionals to create accurate and detailed data visualizations.
• Advanced reporting and dashboarding: Multi-user reports and dashboards, personalized report generation, AI-powered dashboard design, and easy shareability make this a great platform for organizations that require different levels of data visibility and granularity for different stakeholders.
• Automation and governance: Extensive automation and governance capabilities help power users scale their operations without compromising data security. The platform’s robust governance and security features are important to highly regulated businesses and large enterprises in particular.

Pros

• The platform is well integrated with other business tools, like Slack and various email inboxes, making it easier to collaborate and share insights across a team.
• Its AI assistant works well for a variety of data analytics and management tasks, even for users with no data science experience, because of its natural language interface.
• Cognos comes with flexible deployment options, including on-demand cloud, hosted cloud, and client hosting for either on-premises or IaaS infrastructure.

Cons

• The platform is not particularly mobile-friendly compared to similar competitors.
• While a range of visuals are available on the platform, many user reviews indicate that the platform’s visuals are limited and not very customizable.
• Depending on your exact requirements, Cognos Analytics can become quite expensive, especially if you have a high user count or require more advanced features like security and user management.

What Is Power BI?

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence and data visualization software solution that acts as one part of the Microsoft Power Platform. Because of its unification with other Power Platform products like Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Pages, this BI tool gives users diverse low-code and AI-driven operations for more streamlined data analytics and management. Additional integrations with the likes of Microsoft 365, Teams, Azure, and SharePoint are a major selling point, as many business users are already highly invested in these business applications and are familiar with the Microsoft approach to UX/UI.

Specific to analytics functions, Power BI focuses most heavily on data preparation, data discovery, dashboards, and data visualization. Its core features enable users to take visualizations to the next level and empower them to make data-driven decisions, collaborate on reports, and share insights across popular applications. They can also create and modify data reports and dashboards easily and share them securely across applications.

Key Features of Power BI

• Rapidly expanding AI analytics: AI-powered data analysis and report creation have already been established in this platform, but recently, the generative AI Copilot tool has also come into preview for Power BI. This expands the platform’s ability to create reports more quickly, summarize and explain data in real time, and generate DAX calculations.
• CRM integration: Power BI integrates relatively well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which makes it a great option for in-depth marketing and sales analytics tasks. Many similar data platforms do not offer such smooth CRM integration capabilities.
• Embedded and integrated analytics: The platform is available in many different formats, including as an embedded analytics product. This makes it possible for users of other Microsoft products to easily incorporate advanced analytics into their other most-used Microsoft products. You can also embed detailed reports in other apps for key stakeholders who need information in a digestible format.
• Comprehensive visualizations: Adjustable dashboards, AI-generated and templated reports, and a variety of self-service features enable users to set up visuals that can be alphanumeric, graphical, or even include geographic regions and maps. Power BI’s many native visualization options mean users won’t have to spend too much time trying to custom-fit their dashboards and reports to their company’s specific needs.

Pros

• Power BI is one of the more mobile-friendly data platforms on the market today.
• In addition to its user-friendly and easy-to-learn interface, Microsoft offers a range of learning resources and is praised for its customer support.
• Its AI-powered capabilities continue to grow, especially through the company’s close partnership with OpenAI.

Cons

• Some users have commented on the tool’s outdated interface and how data updates, especially for large amounts of data, can be slow and buggy.
• The platform, especially the Desktop tool, uses a lot of processing power, which can occasionally lead to slower load times and platform crashes.
• Shareability and collaboration features are incredibly limited outside of its highest paid plan tier.

Best for Core Features: It Depends

It’s a toss-up when it comes to the core features Cognos Analytics and Power BI bring to the table.

Microsoft Power BI’s core features include a capable mobile interface, AI-powered analytics, democratized report-building tools and templates, and intuitive integrations with other Microsoft products.

IBM Cognos Analytics’ core features include a web-based report authoring tool, natural-language and AI-powered analytics, customizable dashboards, and security and access management capabilities. Both tools offer a variety of core features that work to balance robustness and accessibility for analytics tasks.

To truly differentiate itself, Microsoft consistently releases updates to its cloud-based services, with notable updates and feature additions over the past couple of years including AI-infused experiences, smart narratives (NLG), and anomaly detection capabilities. Additionally, a Power BI Premium version enables multi-geography capabilities and the ability to deploy capacity to one of dozens of data centers worldwide.

On the other hand, IBM has done extensive work to update the Cognos home screen, simplifying the user experience and giving it a more modern look and feel. Onboarding for new users has been streamlined with video tutorials and accelerator content organized in an easy-to-consume format. Additionally, improved search capabilities and enhancements to the Cognos AI Assistant and Watson features help generate dashboards automatically, recommend the best visualizations, and suggest questions to ask — via natural language query — to dive deeper into data exploration.

Taking these core capabilities and recent additions into account, which product wins on core features? Well, it depends on the user’s needs. For most users, Power BI is a stronger option for general cloud and mobility features, while Cognos takes the lead on advanced reporting, data governance, and security.

Also see: Top Dashboard Software & Tools

Best for Ease of Use and Implementation: Power BI

Although it’s close, new users of these tools seem to find Power BI a little easier to use and set up than Cognos Analytics.

As the complexity of your requirements rises, though, the Power BI platform grows more difficult to navigate. Users who are familiar with Microsoft tools will be in the best position to use the platform seamlessly, as they can take advantage of skills from applications they already use, such as Microsoft Excel, to move from building to analyzing to presenting with less data preparation. Further, all Power BI users have access to plenty of free learning opportunities that enable them to rapidly start building reports and dashboards.

Cognos, on the other hand, has a more challenging learning curve, but IBM has been working on this, particularly with recent user interface updates, guided UI for dashboard builds, and assistive AI. The tool’s AI-powered and Watson-backed analytics capabilities in particular lower the barrier of entry to employing advanced data science techniques.

The conclusion: Power BI wins on broad usage by a non-technical audience, whereas IBM has the edge with technical users and continues to improve its stance with less-technical users. Overall, Power BI wins in this category due to generally more favorable user reviews and commentary about ease of use.

Also see: Top AI Software

Best for Advanced Analytics Capabilities: Cognos

Cognos Analytics surpasses Power BI for its variety of in-depth and advanced analytics operations.

Cognos integrates nicely with other IBM solutions, like the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform, which extends the tool’s already robust data analysis and management features. It also brings together a multitude of data sources as well as an AI Assistant tool that can communicate in plain English, sharing fast recommendations that are easy to understand and implement. Additionally, the platform generates an extensive collection of visualizations. This includes geospatial mapping and dashboards that enable the user to drill down, rise, or move horizontally through visuals that are updated in real time.

Recent updates to Cognos’s analytical capabilities include a display of narrative insights in dashboard visualizations to show meaningful aspects of a chart’s data in natural language, the ability to specify the zoom level for dashboard viewing and horizontal scrolling in visualizations, as well as other visualization improvements.

On the modeling side of Cognos, data modules can be dynamically redirected to different data server connections, schemas, or catalogs at run-time. Further, the Convert and Relink options are available for all types of referenced tables, and better web-based modeling has been added.

However, it’s important to note that Cognos still takes a comparatively rigid, templated approach to visualization, which makes custom configurations difficult or even impossible for certain use cases. Additionally, some users say it takes extensive technical aptitude to do more complex analysis.

Power BI’s strength is out-of-the-box analytics that doesn’t require extensive integration or data science smarts. It regularly adds to its feature set. More recently, it has added new features for embedded analytics that enable users to embed an interactive data exploration and report creation experience in applications such as Dynamics 365 and SharePoint.

For modeling, Microsoft has added two new statistical DAX functions, making it possible to simultaneously filter more than one table in a remote source group. It also offers an Optimize ribbon in Power BI Desktop to streamline the process of authoring reports (especially in DirectQuery mode) and more conveniently launch Performance Analyzer to analyze queries and generate report visuals. And while Copilot is still in preview at this time, this tool shows promise for advancing the platform’s advanced analytics capabilities without negatively impacting its ease of use.

In summary, Power BI is good at crunching and analyzing real-time data and continues to grow its capabilities, but Cognos Analytics maintains its edge, especially because Cognos can conduct far deeper analytics explorations on larger amounts of data without as many reported performance issues.

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Best for Cloud Users: Power BI; Best for On-Prem Users: Cognos

Both platforms offer cloud and on-premises options for users, but each one has a clear niche: Power BI is most successful on the cloud, while Cognos has its roots in on-prem setups.

Power BI has a fully functional SaaS version running in Azure as well as an on-premises version in the form of Power BI Report Server. Power BI Desktop is also offered for free as a standalone personal analysis tool.

Although Power BI does offer on-prem capabilities, power users who are engaged in complex analysis of multiple on-premises data sources typically still need to download Power BI Desktop in addition to working with Power BI Report Server. The on-premises product is incredibly limited when it comes to dashboards, streaming analytics, natural language, and alerting.

Cognos also offers both cloud and on-premises versions, with on-demand, hosted, and flexible on-premises deployment options that support reporting, dashboarding, visualizations, alters and monitoring, AI, and security and user management, regardless of which deployment you choose. However, Cognos’ DNA is rooted in on-prem, so it lags behind Microsoft on cloud-based bells and whistles.

Therefore, Microsoft gets the nod for cloud analytics, and Cognos for on-prem, but both are capable of operating in either format.

Also see: Top Data Visualization Tools

Best for Integrations: It Depends

Both Cognos Analytics and Power BI offer a range of helpful data storage, SaaS, and operational tool integrations that users find helpful. Ultimately, neither tool wins this category because they each have different strengths here.

Microsoft offers an extensive array of integration options natively, as well as APIs and partnerships that help to make Power BI more extensible. Power BI is tightly embedded into much of the Microsoft ecosystem, which makes it ideally suited for current Azure, Dynamics, Microsoft 365, and other Microsoft customers. However, the company is facing some challenges when it comes to integrations beyond this ecosystem, and some user reviews have reflected frustrations with that challenge.

IBM Cognos connects to a large number of data sources, including spreadsheets. It is well integrated into several parts of the vast IBM portfolio. It integrates nicely, for example, with the IBM Cloud Pak for Data platform and more recently has added integration with Jupyter notebooks. This means users can create and upload notebooks into Cognos Analytics and work with Cognos Analytics data in a notebook using Python scripts. The platform also comes with useful third-party integrations and connectors for tools like Slack, which help to extend the tool’s collaborative usage capabilities.

This category is all about which platform and IT ecosystem you live within, so it’s hard to say which tool offers the best integration options for your needs. Those invested in Microsoft will enjoy tight integration within that sphere if they select Power BI. Similarly, those who are committed to all things IBM will enjoy the many ways IBM’s diverse product and service set fit with Cognos.

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Best for Pricing: Power BI

While Cognos Analytics offers some lower-level tool features at a low price point, Power BI offers more comprehensive and affordable entry-level packages to its users.

Microsoft is very good at keeping prices low as a tactic for growing market share. It offers a lot of features at a relatively low price. Power BI Pro, for example, costs approximately $10 per user per month, while the Premium plan is $20 per user per month. Free, somewhat limited versions of the platform are also available via Power BI Desktop and free Power BI accounts in Microsoft Fabric.

The bottom line for any rival is that it is hard to compete with Microsoft Power BI on price, especially because many of its most advanced features — including automated ML capabilities and AI-powered services — are available in affordable plan options.

IBM Cognos Analytics, on the other hand, has a reputation for being expensive. It is hard for IBM to compete with Power BI on price alone.

IBM Cognos Analytics pricing starts at $10 per user per month for on-demand cloud access and $5 per user per month for limited mobile user access to visuals and alerts on the cloud-hosted or client-hosted versions. For users who want more than viewer access and the most basic of capabilities, pricing can be anywhere from $40 to $450 per user per month.

Because of the major differences in what each product offers in its affordable plans, Microsoft wins on pricing.

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Why Shouldn’t You Use Cognos or Power BI?

While both data and BI platforms offer extensive capabilities and useful features to users, it’s possible that these tools won’t meet your particular needs or align with industry-specific use cases in your field. If any of the following points are true for your business, you may want to consider an alternative to Cognos or Power BI:

Who Shouldn’t Use Cognos

The following types of users and companies should consider alternatives to Cognos Analytics:

• Users or companies with smaller budgets or who want a straightforward, single pricing package; Cognos tends to have up-charges and add-ons that are only available at an additional cost.
• Users who require extensive customization capabilities, particularly for data visualizations, dashboards, and data exploration.
• Users who want a more advanced cloud deployment option.
• Users who have limited experience with BI and data analytics technology; this tool has a higher learning curve than many of its competitors and limited templates for getting started.
• Users who are already well established with another vendor ecosystem, like Microsoft or Google.

Who Shouldn’t Use Power BI

The following types of users and companies should consider alternatives to Power BI:

• Users who prefer to do their work online rather than on a mobile device; certain features are buggy outside of the mobile interface.
• Users who are not already well acquainted and integrated with the Microsoft ecosystem may face a steep learning curve.
• Users who prefer to manage their data in data warehouses rather than spreadsheets; while data warehouse and data lake integrations are available, including for Microsoft’s OneLake, many users run into issues with data quality in Excel.
• Users who prefer a more modern UI that updates in real time.
• Users who primarily use Macs and Apple products; some users have reported bugs when attempting to use Power BI Desktop on these devices.

Also see: Best Data Analytics Tools

If Cognos or Power BI Isn’t Ideal for You, Check Out These Alternatives

While Cognos and Power BI offer extensive features that will meet the needs of many BI teams and projects, they may not be the best fit for your particular use case. The following alternatives may prove a better fit:

Domo

Domo puts data to work for everyone so they can extend their data’s impact on the business. Underpinned by a secure data foundation, the platform’s cloud-native data experience makes data visible and actionable with user-friendly dashboards and apps. Domo is highly praised for its ability to help companies optimize critical business processes at scale and quickly.

Yellowfin

Yellowfin is a leading embedded analytics platform that offers intuitive self-service BI options. It is particularly successful at accelerating data discovery. Additionally, the platform allows anyone, from an experienced data analyst to a non-technical business user, to create reports in a governed way.

Wyn Enterprise

Wyn Enterprise offers a scalable embedded business intelligence platform without hidden costs. It provides BI reporting, interactive dashboards, alerts and notifications, localization, multitenancy, and white-labeling in a variety of internal and commercial apps. Built for self-service BI, Wyn offers extensive visual data exploration capabilities, creating a data-driven mindset for the everyday user. Wyn’s scalable, server-based licensing model allows room for your business to grow without user fees or limits on data size.

Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a top BI and data analytics platform that works particularly well for users who want self-service capabilities for data visualizations, reporting, and dashboarding. The platform is designed to work with a wide range of data formats and sources, and most significantly, it is well integrated with a Zoho software suite that includes tools for sales and marketing, HR, security and IT management, project management, and finance.

Sigma

Sigma is a cloud-native analytics platform that delivers real-time insights, interactive dashboards, and reports, so you can make data-driven decisions on the fly. With Sigma’s intuitive interface, you don’t need to be a data expert to dive into your data, as no coding or SQL is required to use this tool. Sigma has also recently brought forth Sigma AI features for early access preview.

Review Methodology

The two products in this comparison guide were assessed through a combination of reading product materials on vendor sites, watching demo videos and explanations, reviewing customer reviews across key metrics, and directly comparing each product’s core features through a comparison graph.

Below, you will see four key review categories that we focused on in our research. The percentages used for each of these categories represent the weight of the categorical score for each product.

User experience – 30%

Our review placed a heavy emphasis on user experience, considering both ease of use and implementation as well as the maturity and reliability of product features. We looked for features like AI assistance and low-code/no-code capabilities that lessened the learning curve, as well as learning materials, tutorials, and consistent customer support resources. Additionally, we paid attention to user reviews that commented on the product’s reliability and any issues with bugs, processing times, product crashes, or other performance issues.

Advanced analytics and scalability – 30%

To truly do business intelligence well, especially for modern data analytics requirements, BI tools need to offer advanced capabilities that scale well. For this review, we emphasized AI-driven insights, visuals that are configurable and updated in real time, shareable and collaborative reports and dashboards, and comprehensive features for data preparation, data modeling, and data explainability. As far as scalability goes, we not only looked at the quality of each of these tools but also assessed how well they perform and process data on larger-scale operations. We particularly highlighted any user reviews that mentioned performance lag times or other issues when processing large amounts of data.

Integrations and platform flexibility – 20%

Because these platforms need to be well integrated into a business’s data sources and most-used business applications to be useful, our assessment also paid attention to how integrable and flexible each platform was for different use cases. We considered not only how each tool integrates with other tools from the same vendor but also which data sources, collaboration and communication applications, and other third-party tools are easy to integrate with native integrations and connectors. We also considered the quality of each tool’s APIs and other custom opportunities for integration, configuration, and extensibility.

Affordability – 20%

While affordability is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to BI tools, it’s important to many users that they find a tool that balances an accessible price point with a robust feature set. That’s why we also looked at each tool’s affordability, focusing on entry price points, what key features are and are not included in lower-tier pricing packages, and the jumps in pricing that occur as you switch from tier to tier. We also considered the cost of any additional add-ons that users might need, as well as the potential cost of partnering with a third-party expert to implement the software successfully.

Bottom Line: Cognos vs. Power BI

Microsoft is committed to investing heavily in Power BI and enhancing its integrations across other Microsoft platforms and a growing number of third-party solutions. Any organization that is a heavy user of Office 365, Teams, Dynamics, and/or Azure will find it hard to resist the advantages of deploying Power BI.

And those advantages are only going to increase. On the AI front, for example, the company boasts around 100,000 customers using Power BI’s AI services. It is also putting effort into expanding its AI capabilities, with the generative AI-driven Copilot now in preview for Power BI users. For users with an eye on their budget who don’t want to compromise on advanced analytics and BI features, Power BI is an excellent option.

But IBM isn’t called Big Blue for nothing. It boasts a massive sales and services team and global reach into large enterprise markets. It has also vastly expanded its platform’s AI capabilities, making it a strong tool for democratized data analytics and advanced analytics tasks across the board.

Where Cognos Analytics has its most distinct advantage is at the high end of the market. Microsoft offers most of the features that small, midsize, and larger enterprises need for analytics. However, at the very high end of the analytics market, and in corporate environments with hefty governance and reporting requirements or legacy and on-premises tooling, Cognos has carved out a strategic niche that it serves well.

Ultimately, either tool could work for your organization, depending on your budget, requirements, and previous BI tooling experience. The most important step you can take is to speak directly with representatives from each of these vendors, demo these tools, and determine which product includes the most advantageous capabilities for your team.

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