We performed a comparison between IBM Watson Explorer and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Mining solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"The solution is stable."
"It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc."
"The scalability overall has been quite good."
"What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable."
"It's a very easy-to-use solution."
"The interface is very easy to use."
"MS SQL & SQL Server Analysis Services."
"The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"The solution is expensive."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary"
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"I'm missing collaborations functionality to operate or to work connected with multiple people on a data source or on virtualization. There should be more collaborations functions, such as in Confluence. We haven't explored the solution sufficiently in this area, but at this time it doesn't look sufficient."
"Power BI could be improved by implementing more options for data integration. Nowadays, the cloud takes care of scalability and security. As we all know, data sources are increasing, so we get data from a variety of streams. But if we could get the downstream data into the database and update the reports more easily, Power BI would be better."
"The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."
"I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"Microsoft BI lacks some of the scheme features. It would be beneficial if there were a way to show how we move values in a different way."
"In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility."
"Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do more in-depth analysis and represent the findings."
Earn 20 points
IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 9th in Data Mining while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". 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 Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Tableau, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE. See our IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
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