MS Power BI vs Cognos Analytics (Very Important)

[HelloCognos]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to find some pros and cons or comparison between MS Power BI and Cognos. Our group is working on a comparison between these two products and I thought if someone knows some of the Pros for Cognos that are important to notice when compared to MS Power BI, it would help us to work with the client.

My apologies if the question is not a technical questions.

Thanks for your time.

[Reinhard]

Hi,

I have more to do with Cognos and some with Tableau and only know Power BI from testing it a little so my pros / cons are not mentioning details and might be not up to date or probably wrong.

Power BI has a fat client which means every fat client must be updated with some kind of distribution unlike Cognos where you just update your server and the user has nothing to do.

Cognos has a metadata modelling tool (Framework Manager) in which you can prepare the data to be user friendly so users need no knowledge of sql, relationships or knowledge of the data itself to build reports.

Cognos has a new interface that is very well received especially by new users because it has context menus that only show you what you need to see.

Cognos allows adhoc reporting since it provides users with packages where all joins, names, data formats have already been defined centrally.

Cognos is a browser solution which means you need not to rent a cloud and should you want one you just put the webserver and or Cognos servers into the cloud.

Cognos is an enterprise solution for thousands of users. Power BI seems to be a solution for the departments where every group / department has there reports and builds them very near to the source (meaning db tables) which is more demanding for users.

Cognos lets you create a report and just save it in the web. Power BI needs you to save your report locally or upload it to some cloud / on premise cloud server.

You can do the calculation about the price because even though SSIS, SQL Server Express, Visual Studio and Power BI Client are all free which is great. However, if you have an onpremise solution or the cloud solutions they charge you something like 8€ per user per months adding the server cost which quickly gets near the cost of Cognos but I think Power BI is still cheaper.

Regards

[MFGF]

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to find some pros and cons or comparison between MS Power BI and Cognos. Our group is working on a comparison between these two products and I thought if someone knows some of the Pros for Cognos that are important to notice when compared to MS Power BI, it would help us to work with the client.

My apologies if the question is not a technical questions.

Thanks for your time.

Hi,

The big benefits in using Cognos over PowerBI are:

- Cognos has both enterprise reporting and data discovery capabilities - PowerBI is just data discovery. For enterprise reporting in MS you need Reporting Services - a different product, architecture and utilising an entirely different set of metadata. Cognos gives you in one product what PowerBI and Reporting Services deliver in two.
- Cognos has the ability to utilise the data in-place, allowing you to maintain data governance and security. PowerBI necessitates pulling out the data and you lose your security and governance.
- Cognos includes analytics governance, so you can make sure users are not allowed to do things they shouldn't. PowerBI is ungoverned, so you can't necessarily trust the results it is showing.

Cheers!

MF.

[HelloCognos]

Hi,
What do you mean by Discovery Services? if you could give me a hint of how it is utilized in Cognos.

Thank you so much! I'll include these bullets in my Power Point for convincing the client to stay with Cognos.  :)

[HelloCognos]

Got it!

I wish I knew what kind of learning curve is involved if Complex Calculations needs to be done between different variables?
Isn't another advantage of Cognos is the On-Demand Menu availability to the user to perform calculation, summarization, etc? Or does
Power BI has the same options available to the user?

I won the argument yesterday to not to go away from Cognos but now, I have do some serious demoing and convincing..

Thanks

[Reinhard]

Power BI like Tableau has a fat client and web interface (cloud). On both I have not seen the on-demand menus in reporting like in Cognos 11.

[HelloCognos]

Whoommm! very interesting. That would be a huge advantage for Cognos. Ok, thanks so much.