We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and SAP Analytics Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI is the winner in this comparison. Its users give it higher marks in the customer support category. SAP Analytics users are happier with the pricing, however.
"I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website."
"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."
"Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics."
"It provides good visibility."
"It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs."
"The features that are most valuable in SAP Analytics Cloud are the planning feature and the predictive analytics feature, though the planning feature needs to be more efficient."
"We mainly use Analytics Cloud because it integrates with other SAP solutions. Our ERP is an SAP product, and our back-end is SAP Business Warehouse, so integration is an essential factor."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The solution is stable."
"I would recommend this solution for companies that are SAP dependent with users working in this environment."
"Real-time data makes for a single version of the truth."
"It is a comprehensive BI solution that provides reporting, planning, and predictive analytics in one solution. You don't have to buy three different products. It is very flexible. It can be implemented very quickly. It has a lot of out-of-the-box scenarios that you can use for quick deployment."
"The new Application Design option offers lots of customization options by being able to script in Typescript (similar to Javascript)."
"Power BI could have better metadata management. It's easy to use for a single person. However, it lacks an enterprise-grade metadata management system, which can be a problem if you're doing an enterprise deployment with multiple users."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
"One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. Compared to one of its competitors: Tableau, there are a lot of things which you cannot do in this tool, that can be done in Tableau."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "
"I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment."
"The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files."
"Trend data and dashboards need improvement."
"There should be more features for the time series charts."
"It should have the flexibility for scoping the story and models. When you use it in a three-layer architecture, you struggle with the fact that you usually have just one SAP Analytics Cloud tenant, and you have to switch the connections, which might be an issue for bigger developments. For the development role, there should be an option to switch between development and production scenarios."
"SAP could add some more visualization features to Analytics Cloud, like charts and analytics. I would also like to see some more data cleaning and ad hoc functions added to this solution."
"One area for improvement in SAP Analytics Cloud is incorporating Python into the coding. That functionality is available, but it's not as efficient, and it's a bit difficult sometimes to do it, so that could be improved."
"Currently only one data modeler can work at a time."
"Live Data Models are very slow and the setup can be improved, with tools such as Cloud Connector being inbuilt into SAP Analytics Cloud. Likewise, we need to write application code from scratch, rather than tweaking existing code, as we might with Excel macros. Moreover, when using responsive pages, the widgets get adjusted according to the mobile screen. As a result, when I place two or three KPI tiles, they can only be viewed tile-by-tile. We want to see the full dashboard on the mobile screen and zoom in to click on a particular section of the dashboard and go further into that. But displaying tile-by-tile makes it very annoying and the upper management using this dashboard might not be aware there are any more tiles to view."
"The general management of this solution could be improved. The graphics or icons could also be improved to allow them to integrate with other environments on the web."
"Sometimes there are speed issues with big deletion data."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while SAP Analytics Cloud is ranked 4th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 58 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while SAP Analytics Cloud is rated 8.0. 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 SAP Analytics Cloud writes "Good for reporting but needs to improve its predictive analytics features". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME and Domo, whereas SAP Analytics Cloud is most compared with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Tableau, IBM Planning Analytics, Anaplan and IBM Cognos. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. SAP Analytics Cloud report.
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