Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We are Microsoft resellers.

We use it for clients to extract and analyze data from ERP systems. Then, we basically put it in on-premise Power BI, and once we have the reports and visuals that we want, we publish it to different members of whoever has access to see the reports. Basically, we publish it to their Power BI in the Cloud.

For one client, it gives all sales reps across all geographic regions access to sales data, so they know who's purchasing what product in what part of the country, and that sort of thing. It shows them overtime when sales are high and low, as well as what types of customers are buying. We occasionally connect it to external data. We link it to some demographic data, such as population figures in different provinces in Canada, to see how sales are doing.

It is beneficial. It's one of the applications we use for a client's sales reps all over the country to get all kinds of sales data. It also benefits them. They can ask, "Why isn't this customer purchasing this specific product?" So they know which customers are genuine or who are purchasing and may try to push a different line with them. It provides a wealth of useful information to the salespeople.

It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis. People want to know, for example, which customers are purchasing which products over what time period. It's very simple to make visuals for them. We create a matrix that resembles a spreadsheet and then link it to various graphic visuals, pie charts, and other types of charts. They also get a visual sense of what's going on. Those features are fantastic.

One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel. It is getting better. It's better than it was six, eight, or nine months ago, but it's still not quite there. They could probably improve that a little bit. 

The only disadvantage of how we're using it is that it can be difficult to get the data into Excel at times. A lot of users are very familiar with Excel, so having a seamless interface into Excel would be a big plus for a lot of people, in my opinion. Otherwise, it's an excellent product.

I have been selling Microsoft BI for two years.

I am using the most recent version.

It can be deployed both on the cloud and on-premises.

For us, the stability has been great. We have no issues with the stability of Microsoft BI.

I believe it is a scalable product. I'm aware that they have other products on the market, but I haven't tried them. To analyze data, it appears to be scalable to fairly large businesses. Scalability is quite good.

It is not a single organization. It's amongst a few clients of mine. I would estimate the number of users to be about 20, 25, or something along those lines. Their roles vary a lot. Several users are salespeople and people in purchasing. There are also people in management who use it and people in the accounting area as well. There are also one or two more technical users who use it to export data to Excel PivotTables. These are the people who make use of it.

For one client, it's very extensively used. Others, I wouldn't say that it is used as extensively. They could use it a lot more.

I have not had any interaction with technical support.

Before using Power BI, we used a lot of Excel, Power Pivot, and other similar tools. We transitioned a lot of our data models from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI, including the PivotTables. It was a Microsoft solution. It was Excel, from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI.

The initial setup went quite well. It was a fairly straightforward process. There were no major hiccups.

It took approximately four to five hours to configure.

I have one client who has an administrator who updates the system. He updates the product and his data on a regular basis. I believe the data must be updated once a month. Other clients' updates are handled by me.

We did not need assistance, we completed it in-house.

Yes, I believe so. I haven't actually measured it, but based on one particular client, I believe their company is expanding at a rapid pace. I believe a large portion of it is or a good deal of it is based on the information they receive. I believe there will be a return.

It's straightforward licensing. I would guess we pay $300 to $400 per month for everyone or something along those lines.

Depending on where they're coming from, one thing is that if you want to get deeply involved in it, you have to learn the programming language, which I believe is DAX. It is not difficult to become involved in and learn. Microsoft, in my opinion, has done a good job of making it simple. That's one area I believe people should look into if they want to learn more than just the fundamentals of the DAX programming language. Which we have done in part. Again, we are not experts, but we have looked into it.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten. It does almost everything we require.

Currently, I'm working with an insurance company. Whenever they book any kind of policy, we have a certain rule where we have one predictive loss cost against that particular policy. For example, if you buy one pen, we can predict how much, if the pen got broken, how much premium you're going to pay for this particular pen. Based on that, we identify the risk area and we control the entire policy and the policy sourcing. This is the one interesting use case where we are basically controlling our entire government force.

Microsoft provides internal training and they have open forums. Normally, if we have any query on any part of the product, they'll be very responsive to our needs. 

The alert features are great.

The initial setup is pretty simple. It's a straightforward setup in our industry in particular.

The solution can scale.

We've found the solution to be stable. 

I learned data management and also visualizations on this product, and they are very interactive. Those two things are very strong points for Power BI.

There needs to be more flexibility in terms of handling the data. Data computation is not very good in PowerBI. It's a little bit of a heavier tool.

There are some limitations with the data models needed to build the report. I can't use multiple data models. You can handle lots of data, with higher volume in other tools.

We need some kind of flexibility with the objects, the graphs. We need more control over the data manipulations and data designing parts. That is a big thing from my side.

Some sort of SMS feature that could send alerts would be great for teams that work in the field. It would help, for example, if you forget to access the report. If it was over SMS it would be a game-changer.

I've used the solution over the course of the last year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product can scale. It's not a problem.

We currently have 300 company employees using the solution.

We're getting pushed to use the solution even more. In the next few months, we're likely to increase usage.

Technical support, in terms of security, is good. Microsoft Power BI is very good at responding and the follow-ups are very strong. I'm happy with Microsoft.

I also use SAS Visual Analytics. It's a little bit cheaper, however, it's not that much different in terms of price.

It's a straightforward setup. The deployment took hardly one day. It was quite a short period.

The implementation part varies, however, in our organizations, the deployment is very easy as we have a central team who looks at all the deployment parts. Normally we follow the standard guidelines and then we push further. My internal team is controlling this kind of information. It's much easier for me that way. 

It's easy for my industry. I don't know about the other companies, how the deployment part will go. I can only say that, in the insurance sector and in my organization, it's very easy.

While it depends on the team and the size of the deployment, in our case, we only needed one person to handle the initial setup. He was an operations person.

I have an internal team who deployed the entire thing. We did not use any integrators or consultants. 

We've seen a good ROI. It's a reporting tool that we can use on different platforms like mobile. We can integrate the report with the website. It provides good accessibility. You can access it from anywhere, anytime, and it's scalable. 

We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person.

I explored Tableau, however, I found Power BI more stable.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's above version six.

We are using on-prem. All the development is happening in the development environment and we are pushing to production. It is completed on Azure infrastructure. While production is on the cloud, development is happening on the on-premises server.

Microsoft is a very desirable product and they already have provided extensive support. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. If the data models were more robust, I would rate it higher. 

We built a BI system to provide clients with access to the data that we collect. They can access the data report and various reports by using Power BI.

It is built into the Azure cloud. You can't deploy it otherwise.

We have a product called ED Tracker, and we allow clients to subscribe to this product, and they use it through Power BI. It enables us to offer new services to clients and basically allows them to work on the data or report themselves, rather than sending them data with PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, etc. So, we work with our clients through this platform. They need to have the license. If they want to access the system, we just tell them that they need to get a license. The license is very cheap. It is $10 a month per user. It is not very expensive, and once they have the license, they can access our cloud solution.

Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly.

It is an evolving solution. So, it still has some rough edges. As compared to Tableau or QlikView, there are some things that you can't do when you want to. For example, giving specific access to some reports for users. You can get it up and running very fast, but some things are a bit trickier, and for some of the things, you need to actually write code. 

It is sort of a work in progress. They're catching up on the competition, but it still takes time. Other solutions are more mature, and they have been in the market much longer, but it is catching up. It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better.

There should be the ability to export to PowerPoint or PDF. It should be more efficient. It's rather clunky right now. Sometimes, the system is inconsistent in the way it does things. 

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is adequate in terms of speed and stability. It is very stable. Sometimes, it is a bit slow. It can be faster, but you need to subscribe and purchase additional packages or resources, and then it becomes more expensive.

We haven't scaled yet, but you have the ability to have a dedicated server on Azure with CPU. You can increase and have an SQL Server, so you can scale it.

As of now, we have around 10 to 12 users internally and externally. Some are internal, and some are external clients. We do have plans to increase the usage because we're trying to sell and market the product to other clients as well. So, we do have plans to increase the number of users. One of the benefits is that it doesn't matter if we have 10, 20, or 50 users. It doesn't inflict any costs on us because they go directly to the cloud. They don't come to us. It is very indirect, but we do plan to extend the usage of that system. We might also extend it internally.

Their technical support is absolutely magnificent. A week ago, we had an issue related to permissions, and we couldn't find out how to do that. My colleague contacted the support of Power BI. They not only answered us by mail; they also had a half an hour session with us on Teams to better understand what our issues were. They wanted us to send them the files. They reviewed them and told us that there were still some limitations, but they were working on them, and they will let us know.

We were stunned that someone from Microsoft is interested in what we're doing and someone is willing to go online and have a half an hour session with us so that we can explain what we're doing and what is our issue, and they can think about how to resolve it. We're a small client. We're not a big company. So, we were stunned by their support. Their support is amazing.

A few years ago, we've tested QlikView and Qlik Sense. Their deployment costs were rather high, so we decided to use Power BI.

It was very easy and straightforward. It was rather quick because you can launch it. It is very easy to publish. They give you direct access to their cloud. For small solutions or datasets like ours, the initial setup was a matter of days. We started with the desktop on-premise, and then we published it to the cloud. It was rather easy. It was a matter of days to a week or two.

We used our own team. Its deployment and maintenance are taken care of by a PM and a colleague of mine. It is very easy. You just press publish, and it's off to the cloud.

In terms of ROI, it is a 10 out of 10.

Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. 

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge.

We didn't evaluate other options because we have had some past experience with other solutions. We knew that QlikView might be good, but you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started if you want to do something. We knew the costs, and the entry cost was much higher. So, we decided to go with Power BI. It is also integrated with Office and Excel, so it's very easy to go along and do some of the things that you can do in Excel. It is very easy to transition between them.

If you are looking for a good BI solution for a small business that is very easy to deploy and not costly and that can use the cloud in terms of security, Power BI is probably the best solution in the market.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There are other solutions that might be better than this, but they're more costly. It is the cheapest BI solution in the market. It is not the best in terms of features, but it is the best in terms of value for money. For the volume of work that we have, there is absolutely no competition.

The data is captured by transaction processing systems, and even when the data is captured by a very sophisticated enterprise resource planning system, or ERP system, such as SAP. We'll find that that data is organized in a manner that is suited for the data updated. Therefore, when data has to be used for decision making, it has to be reoriented and organized in a manner that is suitable for data analysis and further for predictive analytics also. What we do is pull out data from multiple data sources, either on SAP or somewhere else.

There could be a certain budget or plan or target-related data on some other platform or on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The data is stored at different places. Some data could be on your internet platforms. Wherever it is, we pull out the data. Then we get that into the SQL server and we organize it in a manner that's suitable for further creation of dashboards and analytics applications, which can be used for better decision making.

The company has been able to make better decisions, due to the fact that, when we prepare business intelligence or data analytics applications, they are used by very similar decision-makers, as well as middle-level management decision-makers. From the same infrastructure, the data is used by even the report consumers. You can consider three layers of users, report consumers, mid-level use, as in, those who do interactive analysis of data, and decision-makers. Right at the top, those who would like to see the key performance indicators and use them for deciding a course of action can do so. All of our applications have been providing functionality for all these types of needs, including risk and compliance.

The solution offers many features, however, just the way in which that product is designed is quite useful for us. 

The way in which it can connect to multiple data sources is also very useful. The way in which data can be manipulated by using data analysis expressions has also been a good feature for us.

The solution is stable.

The solution is quite scalable. 

Our clients seem to be happy with the level of technical support they receive.

With our experience, the initial setup is straightforward.

Microsoft is often updating the solution adding new helpful features.

I'm not a product expert as such, however, I am aware that Microsoft comes out with a newer version, which is really downloadable and it's replaced every month. Therefore, the improvement is continuous. Since Microsoft provides a free downloadable desktop version of our BI. That desktop portion gets a new version which comes every month, we can replace the older version. 

Their ecosystem is quite good in terms of adding new features, in terms of adding custom visuals or adding many more interfaces or reporting features and more functionality within existing reporting and graphs. We don't have much to complain about except that they can always add many more features as they go.

Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution.

We've used the solution since its inception. We've used it for a very long time. We have been in this domain for the past 30 years.

The solution is quite stable. That's why it is right at the top, of Gartner's quadrant. We have deployed it with hundreds of users and it's withstood the test of time.

The solution is quite scalable. Of course, it requires data strategy just like any solution or any tool.

We tend to have 100 to 200 users at a minimum using the solution.

The solution is extensively deployed. We have plans to use it on an ongoing basis. They come out with new versions and new features every month, and this constant updating and iteration of the product have really been very helpful for us to provide more advanced solutions.

In terms of technical support, we don't really deal with it. Normally, our clients have a contract with Microsoft, however, my understanding is that their experience is good. 

We were using a CA tool and we have done work on Oracle. We have done work on many such platforms. However, since 2008 or 2009, we have been focusing on Microsoft as the total cost of ownership has been quite reasonable.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Our implementation strategy involved a business requirement phase where we sought out to understand exactly the expectations for a particular project. Then there is was a design phase where we decided on a data strategy of pulling data from multiple data switches. After that, there was a dashboard design phase, which includes wireframing of dashboards and then designing the dashboards according to those wireframes. Finally, we deploy and in that phase, we put in role level security, et cetera, and deploy it at an enterprise level. The entire process tasks three to four months in total, end-to-end.

We don't require much maintenance due to our maturity in design and development. We have been monitoring sites without having to add too many resources at our end as we have a robust design and maybe one person can handle four to five.

We do the implementation on our own. We have deep experience in this area, and we have developed two types of processes that we use to deploy our solutions. One is the data approach, where you know all best practices and methodologies are embedded into that thing. That framework gives a hundred percent assurance in terms of the success of that project. We have also developed a presentation layer framework whereby different subject areas are designed with very indicative dashboards and those dashboards can be quickly adapted to any data. That way, rather than starting from scratch, we use this framework which helps us to deploy our solution quite successfully. It's very fast also. We save around 50% to 55% of the time this way.

We don't deal directly with licensing. That said, certainly, we are aware in terms of what the Microsoft BI license costs. If it has to be applied on the cloud, then it costs around $10 per month per user. For a pro license and for a premium license it's around $20 per month per user. If it has to be applied on-premises then, depending on the course of your server, you have to buy a software assurance version of the database.

They don't charge for additional features. If you want a premium capacity to handle your work or job, then there is a separate license available. That is a premium license, which is available with the entire product managed by Microsoft and you can use lot more features, including Azure, et cetera.

We are Microsoft partners.

We have two deployment options. Some of our clients have deployed the cloud solution. Some are deployed on-premises.

Anybody who has worked on existing spreadsheet-based solutions can quickly adapt to Microsoft BI and the data visualization and interactive data features, they'll find it very exciting to use and very fast to adapt to it. It's a very effective solution.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I would describe myself as more of a casual user, only because I have so many other things that I have to get done. I wish I could be more of a user, but it's hard. Right now, I have two different main use cases. I use it for teaching. At another institution, I use it for demonstrating how easy it is to build dashboards. It was really to show to all my users the benefit of business analytics. I use it to demonstrate how easy it is to generate your own analytics versus having a department run reports for you then putting it in Excel and making graphs. 

I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice.

The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section. It's probably designed by data analysts that typically get the data from somewhere else. So, one person logs into Power BI, moves the data around and puts it in the proper form then somebody else goes in from the dashboard. What I'm finding more and more is that the person playing with the data is also going to be the person building the dashboard, so the interface needs to be more seamless and dumbed down for the average user. 

Tableau is much better at that, which is probably why it's more expensive. The days where one person works on the data and someone else does the analytics are coming to an end. In the past, larger organizations usually had a dedicated analytics team and a dedicated data team. Now we buy data as a service, so we got rid of our data team and we don't have analysts per se. Instead, we have smart users. So I think Microsoft BI needs to move on to the next iteration of truly user-friendly solutions.

I've been using Microsoft BI for about three years.

Microsoft BI has never crashed on me.

I honestly can't comment on how scalable Microsoft BI is because I've never taken it beyond training or simple use. But I would imagine, if it's on Azure, that it's scalable. I haven't had the pleasure of scaling it, so I don't know, but it doesn't strike me as a solution that would have problems with scalability.

I have not had to contact technical support, but I've actually downloaded and taken three Power BI courses for free and they're very good.

I was using Tableau but the licensing cost went up when Salesforce required them to raise the price. But if the price hadn't changed, I would've absolutely stuck with Tableau because I like it. I do not know about the cost of the licenses. We buy it from the state and when it went up, our CIO at the time said no more Tableau licenses. I had to scramble to find a replacement, and fortunately, I discovered that Power BI is included in Microsoft 365. However, I prefer Tableau's interface. Microsoft BI's user interface is convoluted in terms of how you attach a data source. You have a separate screen for defining your data and then you have to jump to a different screen to model the results. In other words, there are two separate interfaces for data and analytics. In Tableau, it's more seamless. 

Setup is very easy. You click on the icon, download the MSI, and it loads itself. It takes about a couple of hours to deploy overall.

I'd rate Microsoft BI as an eight out of 10. The biggest drawback is the user interface. From what I'm seeing, Windows 11 is going to have a more user-friendly interface. Even Microsoft Edge is adopting a more user-friendly interface. I'm hoping that Power BI follows this trend as well. 

My advice for anyone who is thinking about adopting Microsoft BI is to understand what you're trying to do with it. If you're trying to do analytics with it, then it depends on the kind of analytics. If you're want to do statistical analytics, it's not the tool for you. It's a tool that's better suited for visual analytics than it is for straight-up analytics. If you're dealing with patterns and data, it's great. If you're working with numbers and data, it's not so good. You're better off with a statistical package.

We are using it for financial analytics and reporting. We are using it to keep a track of projects and being able to degrade the projects. We are also using it for contract closeout.

My technical guy has been using the first version of it since it came out, but we are getting ready to upgrade to the newer version. It comes along in a bundle with the 365 Enterprise version.

It is on the cloud. We're probably going to run a hybrid because we want to be able to move around. If anything happens or if needed, we can move from platform to platform.

We can see things from a bird's eye view. We can do predictive analytics. I can tell who's capable, who's doing what, when and how much money they're spending, and how fast they're burning. So, it gives us a bird's eye view over the financials and the money. It basically gives us the ability to collaborate and keep track of everything that's going on in an organization. We were able to bring all the collaboration and tasks right into Power BI.

It is easy to use. It has got a desktop where people can develop their own dashboards. Basically, we have figured out how to connect finance contracts and all programs for the government agency. So, they can see everything in a dashboard. So, it is very easy to use from a technical standpoint of view. We publish a report every morning for the government, and we got all the data into one place. The data can be refreshed. We are using the API to connect to various systems, such as the financial system, contract writing system, and workflow. We are able to bring things from NIPA, which is their budget and where they keep all their money. There are a lot of features, but the most important thing is it is very easy to use. It is not like Tableau. With Tableau, you've almost got to be a rocket scientist.

On the user side, it is quite simple. If you know how to run a pivot table, and then you can do almost anything. All the data is right there in the database. So, if you understand pivot tables and know how they are run, and you know the reports that you are looking for, then everything becomes very easy to run in your organization.

Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop.

We've been using Microsoft BI for about four and a half years.

Its stability is pretty good. It is pretty stable.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 in terms of scalability. Currently, we are running a pilot. We're doing a pilot for army headquarters. They dictate what happens and what they use. Currently, there are 10 users, but I'm looking to go up to at least a hundred. 

We got an architect and an assistant administrator. We got a staff of three and a half people because people take vacations or sick leaves. The good part about it is that these people can work from anywhere.

We are a Microsoft reseller. We have partnered with Microsoft. We have developed a relationship with their technical folks over the years. So, we kind of go directly to them. My partner came from Microsoft, so he has a very good relationship with a few technical folks. So, we, kind of, have some special privileges that a couple of other vendors don't have.

As a matter of fact, we had built a tool, but it took so long to get it vetted and get it through to ATOs. That's when we decided to convert to Microsoft Power BI. It has already been vetted and approved in the army environment. It is an approved government site for cloud services. We were looking for the easiest path, and that's why we worked with Microsoft BI. They've already been embedded into the government. It is bundled with Office 365.

If my technical person had to rate it, he would say very easy. All we need is to have the software.

It was done in-house.

They are charging us by users in storage, and there is a license fee. My financial people handle all that. The client has already worked out a contract with Microsoft, and basically, we're getting government prices.

The backend is the most important part. We understand its backend. We implemented the on-time system for an airport. We don't find its modeling complicated. We set up the back offices and get all the modeling done and everything connected. The customer doesn't even see that. They only see the part where they're running their reports and doing the analytics or whatever they need to do. We give them all the information at their fingertips.

Everybody is going to Business Analytics. A lot of people don't understand the difference between analytics and coding, but that's something for me to teach and educate them on.

I would advise doing your testing and environment setup. You should evaluate your product very well and figure out what platform your organization is running on. You should be careful and look at how well it integrates with other products. If you're not in a Microsoft environment, it is going to be quite difficult. Oracle and Microsoft are competitive. So, you go with one or the other. The reason why I like Microsoft is that they integrate with all applications. Microsoft controls 99% of the desktops.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of 10.

We utilize Microsoft BI for conducting comprehensive analytics by comparing data from the current year with the preceding year to identify patterns and variations. This software aids us in performing overall data analysis.

The solution can be deployed on the cloud and on-premise.

Microsoft BI has proven beneficial for my organization as it simplifies the presentation of complex data that was previously challenging to comprehend through other means. Specifically, Power BI allows for graphical representation that significantly enhances data understanding compared to raw tables.

The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use.

Microsoft BI lacks some of the scheme features. It would be beneficial if there were a way to show how we move values in a different way.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

I rate the stability of Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

I have plans to use the solution more in the future.

I rate the scalability of Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

The initial setup of Microsoft BI is simple.

We have received a return on investment using Microsoft BI.

The price of the license can be better. 

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

The use case for power BI is to generate dashboards for high-end management and operational dashboards.

Microsoft BI, if used properly, can provide insights that will help management to take better decisions and can benefit from cost optimizations, reduce risks, etc.

What I like about Power BI is how fast you are able to create dashboards and how fast you are able to fetch the data. You can connect to the database or data source, and then you can design your dashboards very easily.

The best thing about Power BI is that you can manipulate the data within Power BI, so you don't have to update the data source to have filtration or conditional formatting. You can easily do those things under Power BI.

It is easy and has rapid development.

It is stable and scalable as well.

There is an issue with Microsoft because the on-premises Power BI is behind the cloud Power BI. So, the on-premises Power BI is six months or one year behind the cloud version because Microsoft published the cloud features first, and then they published the on-premises version. This has been an issue. They should be on the same level of capability.

There are some limitations in Power BI; you have to work in the Power BI base. However, if you want something not out-of-the-box and you want something custom, you have to do a lot of work. Microsoft can provide some easy way to customize the dashboards.

I've been using this solution for two to three years.

It is stable, but there is an issue with Microsoft because the on-premises Power BI is behind the cloud Power BI. The features of on-premises Power BI are six months or one year behind the cloud version. They are not on the same level of capability.

The scalability of Power BI is quite good.

Microsoft technical support could be more knowledgeable.

We switched to Power BI because it is easy, and there is rapid development.

Installation is easy and took about half an hour.

It requires a little bit of effort, and we needed the help of a consultant.

Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost.

If you want to use Power BI, you should go for the cloud version. Don't use the on-premises version because the cloud version has a lot of features which the on-premises version doesn't have.

Also, if you are going to use Power BI, you should know what all your capabilities are. Otherwise, if you try to do some things such as develop a dashboard which is not supported by Power BI, it will be a showstopper for you.

I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.