We performed a comparison between IBM Planning Analytics and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan, Oracle, Jedox and others in Business Performance Management."Planning Analytics' best features include automatic updates and slicing."
"The most valuable features of IBM Planning Analytics for streamlining planning processes include a unified database where all data are centralized."
"It's a very stable, robust product."
"The ease of use is valuable. The fact that it's plugged into Excel spreadsheets is also valuable. It provides additional functionality where you can slice and dice the information in a way that you can't do with spreadsheets"
"Navigating through the data to make analysis is really quick."
"IBM Planning Analytics is easy to use and deploy. It is quick to develop. The calculation machine is also very fast."
"The product's stability is good."
"The tool is flexible."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"The product is easy to use and simple to navigate."
"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice."
"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."
"I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is the drill-through feature that takes you to a details page the users want to see."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It provides good visibility."
"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It would have been better if the solution was not just a tool kit."
"The new frontend Planning Analytics Workspace is not very good, it could be improved. I like the Planning Analytics functionality but it would be helpful if it could be more customizable. You can create a prediction and receive information but you cannot do feature engineering regarding the predictive models. If this was added it would be helpful."
"It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality."
"The tool should include features for prediction. It can also improve the scalability."
"The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement."
"Adding predefined templates could be beneficial."
"Extracting data is a little slow."
"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."
"We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python."
"Actionable insights could be better."
"It needs more analytic tools."
"There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise."
"Sometimes while developing, the front end is not easily customizable and it has limitations. We cannot go and do any UI we want. We have to stick to the limitations of the product."
"I'm looking for something that can make it much easier to incorporate Power BI visuals or dashboards into, let's say, Power Apps – custom Power Apps or anything like that. The most important thing would be to seamlessly embed reports in applications. For example, to have buttons that can be navigated through multiple solutions – from Power Apps to Power BI to SharePoint – via links or something like that."
"The solution could improve the extraction and transformation of data. For example, you transform the data and then send it to Microsoft BI without having to use your own API. We are only providing the API to Power BI, and then Power BI is doing the job."
IBM Planning Analytics is ranked 5th in Business Performance Management with 22 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. IBM Planning Analytics is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Planning Analytics writes "Can easily create dashboards and helps businesses improve forecasting accuracy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". IBM Planning Analytics is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Anaplan, Jedox, IBM Cognos and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE.
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