Microsoft Power BI vs Plotly comparison

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Microsoft Logo
19,900 views|17,006 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Plotly Logo
1,027 views|1,097 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Plotly based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools.""The reports are easy to create.""Microsoft BI's initial setup is very straightforward.""I like all the tools in Microsoft BI because they all have different purposes. There are a lot of people using Microsoft BI, and everybody is using it. The users have adapted well to the technology.""Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard.""I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use.""We are able to collaborate on things and get insightful data visualizations.""The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."

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"When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets.""The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me.""It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."

More Plotly Pros →

Cons
"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case.""It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community.""I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint.""One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel.""It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency.""There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for the solution.""Capacity could be improved.""It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it."

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"The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform.""I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.""The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."
  • "MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
  • "All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights."
  • "I would advise that Microsoft BI products are rightly priced and the licensing is easy to follow and to fulfill."
  • "Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
  • "Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer!"
  • "Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
  • "Paid for itself in the first month."
  • More Microsoft Power BI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I only use the free tier of the product."
  • "It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices could be on the premium side."
  • More Plotly Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.
    Top Answer:It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices are on the premium side. I rate the product price as five or six on a scale of one to ten… more »
    Top Answer:I believe that the price of the tool's paid services is on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.
    Ranking
    1st
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    19,900
    Comparisons
    17,006
    Reviews
    23
    Average Words per Review
    553
    Rating
    7.9
    15th
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    1,027
    Comparisons
    1,097
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    614
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Tableau logo
    Compared 37% of the time.
    TIBCO Spotfire logo
    Compared 10% of the time.
    Qlik Sense logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    RStudio Connect logo
    Compared 4% of the time.
    Also Known As
    SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
    Learn More
    Overview

    Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

    Plotly creates leading open source tools for composing, editing, and sharing interactive data visualization via the Web.

    Our collaboration servers (available in cloud or on premises) allow data scientists to showcase their work, make graphs without coding, and collaborate with business analysts, designers, executives, and clients.

    Sample Customers
    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
    Google, Goji, VIT, Smpl Bio, U.S. Air Force, C12 Energy, New York University
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Government5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Manufacturing Company13%
    Government5%
    University5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise41%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise6%
    Large Enterprise79%
    Buyer's Guide
    Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 297 reviews while Plotly is ranked 15th in Reporting with 3 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while Plotly is rated 7.6. 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)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plotly writes "An interactive and easy-to-use solution that can be used to create dashboards". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Plotly is most compared with Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, Qlik Sense and RStudio Connect. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly report.

    See our list of best Reporting vendors.

    We monitor all Reporting reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.