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Microsoft Power BI vs Power BI Embedded Analytics 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

Microsoft Power BI
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
1st
Ranking in Reporting
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
329
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Power BI Embedded Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
28th
Ranking in Reporting
19th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Flor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group
Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards
Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai
Embedded analytics has unified diverse data sources and supports real-time operational decisions
I find Power BI Embedded Analytics to be a fairly good reporting tool and dashboarding tool. The color palette and everything about it is good. It would be beneficial to have reporting on top of a data warehouse, a lake house, or directly on an Excel-based solution. If Power BI can come as a full stack similar to SAP Analytics Cloud, it can embed with Azure very quickly. However, the full suite provided by SAP, starting from ERP through reporting, is somewhat loosely coupled, which can be helpful for some clients. Overall, Power BI is a very good tool for reporting. Embedded analytics may lack some features from the modeling perspective, such as dimension modeling, and there are multiple factors that lead us to prefer analytics on top of the warehouse rather than going for embedded analytics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design; I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau."
"We find Power BI is more direct, it is much easier to connect to other data sources and so forth."
"Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it."
"We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way."
"You can find everything on their website."
"Microsoft Power BI has positively impacted our organization because it has saved a lot of time in creating dashboards, which we were previously doing in Excel sheets."
"You don't need much support with Microsoft Power BI because it has such a large base of users who can answer your questions on their forums. There are also many video tutorials and webinars available online that offer solutions to whatever problems you may have."
"For one client, it gives all sales reps across all geographic regions access to sales data, so they know who is purchasing what product in what part of the country, and that sort of thing."
"What I appreciate most about Power BI Embedded Analytics is that it is tightly integrated with Microsoft, which is a strong feature."
 

Cons

"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."
"We need more integration capabilities."
"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."
"We'd like to have the ability to relate different reports by common factors from the user side, including relating different reports directly instead of fetching the data to enter into an external tool like Excel or something like that. The reporting needs to be improved."
"The solution is not really stable. I've faced a lot of limitations especially in terms of some data flows updates."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved for reporting aspects."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case."
"Embedded analytics may lack some features from the modeling perspective, such as dimension modeling, and there are multiple factors that lead us to prefer analytics on top of the warehouse rather than going for embedded analytics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license."
"Microsoft BI is not expensive. Compared to the price of other BI products, the price is very fair."
"It is based on the usage. If you're using it, you pay for it, and if you're not using it, you stop paying for it."
"We have a professional license for Microsoft BI and the price is fair."
"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
"Microsoft BI requires licenses."
Information not available
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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
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business135
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise166
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What needs improvement with Power BI Embedded Analytics?
I find Power BI Embedded Analytics to be a fairly good reporting tool and dashboarding tool. The color palette and everything about it is good. It would be beneficial to have reporting on top of a ...
What is your primary use case for Power BI Embedded Analytics?
I use Power BI Embedded Analytics for various purposes including reporting, dashboarding, supply chain management, daily management dashboards, and profitability analytics dashboards for finance. I...
What advice do you have for others considering Power BI Embedded Analytics?
I do use Power BI Embedded Analytics's custom visualization. Power BI Embedded Analytics helps consolidate data from multiple sources in my environment as we generally work with heterogeneous syste...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

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
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