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Microsoft Power BI vs icCube 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

icCube
Ranking in Reporting
43rd
Average Rating
10.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (19th)
Microsoft Power BI
Ranking in Reporting
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
332
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of icCube is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 12.9%, down from 25.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI12.9%
icCube0.8%
Other86.3%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

it_user7056 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Economically priced, runs on all platforms, excellent cube building and query performance.
Economically priced, runs on all platforms, excellent cube building and query performance, and the development time to first report is very short even for an MDX novice.  The MDX IDE is fabulous. They respond quickly and responsibly to support requests.  New features in the reporting module…
Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Interactive dashboards have transformed restaurant data into faster daily business decisions
Microsoft Power BI has many features and there is not a lot to improve. However, the licensing can be confusing. When deciding between Pro and Premium, I find it difficult to distinguish what features are offered by Pro and what features are offered by Premium, including the particular differences to choose between both licensing models. Additionally, some features such as DAX, which I mentioned previously, involve DAX calculations and complex data modeling, which are somewhat advanced and not easily understandable. Prior knowledge is required or you need to go through the documentation. If the documentation is made comprehensive so that anyone with no knowledge on DAX can easily use it by going through the documentation, it would be really helpful. Additionally, if the integration with non-Microsoft tools is improved and performance is optimized, then Microsoft Power BI can become a top-ranked visualization tool. The user experience with Microsoft Power BI is quite good. The intuitive user interface makes it easy for both technical and non-technical users to create reports. However, only the advanced features are somewhat complex, and if the documentation is improved, it can be easily accessible.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Economically priced, runs on all platforms, excellent cube building and query performance, and the development time to first report is very short even for an MDX novice."
"The demand estimation and forecasting profitability are the most effective features of Microsoft Power BI, along with vendor and supply chain risk analysis, inventory and stock forecasting, real-time production monitoring, and quality control through defect tracking and root cause analysis."
"Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities, as it provides an entire feature set and a complete solution with tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, the Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python."
"The primary use cases for Microsoft BI are typical for business intelligence, including operational monitoring and KPI tracking."
"My overall experience with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is that it is easy to install and to integrate in an enterprise setting."
"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."
"SSRS and the Tabular server/Vertipaq engine/DAX are probably the two most valuable components."
"In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results."
"Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes."
 

Cons

"As with many products, the documentation is light in some areas."
"I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint."
"Microsoft's solution is not good for improving the product for the customers."
"The issue with the data refresh frequency in Microsoft Power BI is that it's not frequent enough."
"They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features."
"Real-time data integration is an area for improvement."
"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."
"The maps in Power BI could be improved. You deal with many maps over the years, like maps of America and Saudi Arabia. The maps aren't detailed enough, and there aren't enough visualization tools. Whenever I want to use a map, I struggle with choosing the right visualization."
"Creating dashboards could be easier."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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."
"The licensing can be complicated."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."
"The current licensing model that Microsoft BI has is expensive. My customers have told me the cost is approximately $20 per user and this can get expensive fast. There should be a one-time purchase option if the customer has a lot of users."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis, but I am not sure."
"Its pricing is great."
"Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan."
"This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license."
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908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business137
Midsize Enterprise59
Large Enterprise171
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Binary, TU/e, Kantar Worldpanel, Rivo
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 Microsoft, Salesforce, Plotly and others in Reporting. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.