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Dremio vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

 

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

Dremio
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (6th), Data Science Platforms (10th)
Microsoft Power BI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
326
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Dremio is designed for Data Science Platforms and holds a mindshare of 3.1%, down 4.0% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 14.1% mindshare, down 21.7% since last year.
Data Science Platforms Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Dremio3.1%
Databricks13.9%
KNIME Business Hub11.9%
Other71.1%
Data Science Platforms
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI14.1%
Tableau Enterprise10.3%
Amazon QuickSight4.9%
Other70.7%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

KamleshPant - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution offers quick data connection with an edge in computation
It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS. It is a similar experience between the based application and cloud-based application. You just get the source, connect the data, get visualization, get connected, and do whatever you want. They say data reflection is one way where they do the caching and all that. Starburst also does the caching. In Starburst, you have a data product. Here, the data product comes from a reflection perspective. The y are working on a columnar memory map, columnar computation. That will have some edge in computation.
Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dremio is very easy to use for building queries."
"Dremio has positively impacted my organization by helping us create a single source of truth, a singular data warehouse where we can have access to all of the data sets."
"The most valuable feature of Dremio is it can sit on top of any other data storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Data Factory, SGFS, or Hive. The memory competition is good. If you are running any kind of materialized view, you'd be running in memory."
"Everyone uses Dremio in my company; some use it only for the analytics function."
"Dremio gives you the ability to create services which do not require additional resources and sterilization."
"It's almost similar, yet it's better than Starburst in spinning up or connecting to the new source since it's on SaaS."
"The first feature that stands out for me in Dremio is the federated type of query, which allows the possibility to use multiple endpoints without worrying about writing custom SQL that runs only for SQL Server or for Postgres and Redshift."
"Dremio enables you to manage changes more effectively than any other data warehouse platform. There are two things that come into play. One is data lineage. If you are looking at data in Dremio, you may want to know the source and what happened to it along the way or how it may have been transformed in the data pipeline to get to the point where you're consuming it."
"Our setup is very straight forward and can be done in a matter of hours."
"The product is user-friendly."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably."
"PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"It's pretty easy to set up the product."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
 

Cons

"Dremio doesn't support the Delta connector. Dremio writes the IT support for Delta, but the support isn't great. There is definitely room for improvement."
"They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today."
"We've faced a challenge with integrating Dremio and Databricks, specifically regarding authentication. It is not shaking hands very easily."
"Dremio takes a long time to execute large queries or the executing of correlated queries or nested queries. Additionally, the solution could improve if we could read data from the streaming pipelines or if it allowed us to create the ETL pipeline directly on top of it, similar to Snowflake."
"We had a memory leak on some versions, which sometimes stopped the service."
"There are performance issues at times due to our limited experience with Dremio, and the fact that we are running it on single nodes using a community version."
"I cannot use the recursive common table expression (CTE) in Dremio because the support page says it's currently unsupported."
"It shows errors sometimes."
"The initial setup is a little bit technical."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"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."
"Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop."
"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."
"The challenge of this product is in truncating the table data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Right now the cluster costs approximately $200,000 per month and is based on the volume of data we have."
"Dremio is less costly competitively to Snowflake or any other tool."
"I would rate them 4 out of 5 for their current pricing. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."
"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."
"We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate."
"I very much recommend the free trial mode."
"Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI."
"We view it as an expensive product."
"The premium capacity is very costly in respect of the market in Egypt, amounting to $5,000 monthly."
"The solution is less expensive than other PowerBI tools, which is why most people go with it, although it does cost more than MSBI tools."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Financial Services Firm
29%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business134
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise165
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dremio?
Dremio allows querying the files I have on my block storage or object storage.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dremio?
The licensing is very expensive. We need a license to scale as we are currently using the community version.
What needs improvement with Dremio?
They need to have multiple connectors. Starburst is rich in connectors, however, they are lacking Salesforce connectivity as of today. They don't have Salesforce connectivity. However, Starburst do...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

UBS, TransUnion, Quantium, Daimler, OVH
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Knime and others in Data Science Platforms. Updated: October 2025.
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