Microsoft Power BI pros and cons

4.0 out of 5

321 reviews
93% willing to recommend

12K followers

Pros & Cons summary

Microsoft Power BI offers strong integration with other Microsoft products, boosting data connectivity and workflow efficiency. It provides customizable visualizations and supports DAX and Power Query languages for enhanced data analysis. While it excels in data integration and scalability, it struggles with large datasets, affecting performance. Integration with non-Microsoft sources is limited, and its licensing structure is complex and costly. Real-time data capabilities need improvement for seamless operation, and error messaging requires enhancements.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Microsoft Power BI provides easy integration with Office tools, MS SQL, SQL Server Analysis Services, and various other Microsoft products.

Power BI's data integration allows organizations to pool data from varied systems into a single data warehouse, enhancing decision-making and management insights.

With its self-service BI capabilities, Power BI empowers end-users to perform data analysis and create reports without extensive technical expertise.

Its ability to create customized visualizations and dashboards enables users to quickly interpret data, facilitating efficient and informed business decisions.

Power BI's powerful DAX and Power Query M languages support complex data analytics, making it a strong tool for in-depth data analysis and insights.

CONS

Licensing can be quite complex and costly, creating challenges for users trying to understand the necessary costs and structure.

Real-time data refresh capabilities are lacking, which can cause delays and performance issues when handling large datasets.

Integration with non-Microsoft data sources can be difficult, limiting the ability to connect seamlessly with other platforms.

There are stability issues, particularly with real-time data integration and when dealing with large datasets.

Metadata management in Microsoft Power BI is not enterprise-grade, which can create problems during large-scale deployments.

Microsoft Power BI Pros review quotes

Tariq Raza (MS Certified)

Operations & BI Analyst at American Hospital Dubai

Apr 15, 2021

Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis.