No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Cognos vs Power BI Embedded Analytics comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
11th
Ranking in Reporting
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
140
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Power BI Embedded Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
28th
Ranking in Reporting
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

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

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This is an all-in-one solution that provides reporting for a lot of different reports and visualizations."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"Active Reports are valuable for the organization because you can save it with the .mhtm file extension and can open it as an offline report at any time; it does not need an internet connection."
"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."
"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 solution's initial setup process is easy."
"The upgraded visualizations and more user-friendly interface have increased the acceptance rate of this tool."
"What I appreciate most about Power BI Embedded Analytics is that it is tightly integrated with Microsoft, which is a strong feature."
"The positive impact Power BI Embedded Analytics has made in my organization is the gain of time, the sharing of the same data, and the same information for all the stakeholders, leading to better decisions."
 

Cons

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"It is very expensive… You have to determine if the complexity of software you are getting is worth the price you are paying; how many bells and whistles do you need for what price."
"Complex to learn and use. Need technical team to build solutions."
"I would like them to reduce the cost of the user licenses."
"Visualization is not as good as some others."
"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"Sometimes technical support can be hit and miss."
"Embedded analytics may lack some features from the modeling perspective, such as dimension modeling, and there are multiple factors that lead us to prefer analytics on top of the warehouse rather than going for embedded analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"There is a standard license required to use this solution. There are some additional tools but I am not sure if they are an extra cost."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"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."
"Pricing should be improved."
"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."
"It is averagely priced."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

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

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Insurance Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
21%
Media Company
19%
Comms Service Provider
14%
Outsourcing Company
10%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

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

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Cognos vs. Power BI Embedded Analytics and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.