Analytics Showdown: IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau vs. MicroStrategy vs. Qlik vs. ThoughtSpot

Danny Gargus and Craig Colangelo, March 25, 2021

The Ultimate Showdown

Business Intelligence tools have changed rapidly over the last few years with many vendors pushing out multiple updates each year – some even quarterly. It has become difficult to keep track of the myriad changes to the tools as each release brings them functionally closer to each other. The matrix below attempts to shed light on some of the differences between six of the leading BI tools.

Analytics Showdown: IBM Cognos vs. Microsoft Power BI vs. Tableau vs. MicroStrategy vs. Qlik vs. ThoughtSpot
All Analytics/BI tools report against data in some for or fashion. This document shows some of the similarities and differences between market leaders. Subjective capabilities such as “Which product has better ease of use?” are not covered here. Questions? Comment below or contact us.
FEATURE
Web-based or Desktop development	Web	Both	Desktop	Both	Both	Web
Data Import or Direct Query	Both	Both	Both	Both	Both	Both
Gartner Mode 1	Yes	Yes	Limited	Yes	Yes (extension req’d)	No
Formatted production style reporting, scheduled distributed reports – requirements are well-understood in advance and can be identified by a process of analysis
Gartner Mode 2	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Visual-based exploration, agile, self-service, exploratory, involving experimentation to solve new problems, and optimized for areas of uncertainty.
Use of Stories	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes (not narrative)
Allow for analytics be presented in a narrative form and allows for creation of a presentation like PowerPoint but using live data.
Text Box Prompts	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Expression-Based Conditional Formatting	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
Multiple data source connections in the same report	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes (extension req’d)	Yes	Yes
Jupyter Notebooks integration	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No
Open-source web application that allows for creation and sharing of documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, & narratives.
Export to PowerPoint	No (included add-on req’d)	Yes	Yes	No (office add-on req’d)	Yes (extension req’d)	No
Export to Excel with formatting	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	No
Report Bursting	Yes	No	Yes	Yes (w/ Narrowcast Server)	No	No
Generates targeted report output based on data from a single report run that is divided amongst the subsets.
Email reports to a distribution list	Yes	Yes/No (depends on Version)	Yes	Yes	Yes (extension req’d)	Yes
Custom D3 Visualizations	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No
D3 is a JavaScript library for producing dynamic, interactive data visualizations in web browsers
Schematics visuals	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes (extension req’d)	No
Ability to map data to custom vector image. (i.e. – airline seating chart)
Row level security	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Conclusion

As you can see there are still quite a few differences between the products. With each new release, we expect that the functionality gap will increase and decrease as new features are added that didn’t exist before and existing features are implemented as a response to another vendor’s updated product. Some of these are just personal preferences and others may or may not be important to your company’s processes and goals. By the time you read this, there may have already been updates that make some of these differences obsolete! As always though, if you need help navigating the BI space, let PMsquare be your analytics guide.

If you aren’t sure which BI tool is the best match for your organization and need help, reach out to us or chat with us by clicking the bubble in the bottom right of your screen.

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