Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

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

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI a seven out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for the reports. We use it a lot for self-reporting.

We're making a dashboard that can show specific details and can be easily customized. It's very useful for creating dashboards.

The reporting is good.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale it if we need to.

It's a very easy-to-use solution. The product is quite user-friendly.

The initial installation is difficult. 

The pricing is a bit high and we'd like it to be less expensive.

I've used the solution for two years now.

The product is stable. Its performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is good. If a company wants to, it can expand.

We have about 15 to 20 people that use the solution.

We're not sure if we will expand usage in the future or not. That's still to be decided.

We manage technical support ourselves. We do not need to reach out to Microsoft for help. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

I found the initial setup to be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. The deployment might take about an hour.

We use three people for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We have to pay for licensing. I've paid for a license in the past.

We'd like for it to be a little less expensive.

I would recommend the solution to others based on its ease of use.

I largely work with the engineering and R&D teams. Typically, the data insights and data teams use Power BI for business-related data visualization. However, for me and my customers, most of the tools like Power BI and Tableau are used to do data visualization for the engineering data. That could be even predicting the behavior of a machine, meantime between failure, or tracking of an IoT center data or even the behavior of the fleet management and things like that. In all the engineering use cases where we need data visualization, we use this product.

We have 16,000 to 17,000 or more people who are trained in insights and data. This group uses all the data analytics tools, data visualization tools, BI tools, and all the other tools from a business use cases perspective. It could be market basket analysis, sales reports, and all those kinds of other business reporting.

The solution has been stable.

We've found that the scalability meets our current needs.

It's good for data visualization and analysis. 

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty easy.

Technical support has always been great for us, as strategic partners. 

There could be more scalability.

Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data. Those would be good to have.

We've been using the solution since Microsoft introduced the solution to the market.

The product is more or less stable. Power BI doesn't have any problem with the stability aspect.

The solution can scale. It meets our needs.

We are dedicated partners. We have a couple of Microsoft architects that are dedicated to us. We have fairly decent support. I don't have any problem with them. If you ask a commercial end-user what kind of Microsoft support they get, in that case, you might get a disappointing answer. For us, we are satisfied.

I work with a services company and we work with a lot of different customers. So depending on which customer, what is that ecosystem, we'll end up using a lot of different BI tools. That includes both licensed and open-sourced software as well. For example, we've used Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

I am personally not involved in the implementation process, however, my understanding is it's not that difficult to set up.

I don't oversee day-to-day operations. I just have a team that does that for me.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing. Sometimes we, for example, resell some licenses. We are strategic partners with Microsoft. It entirely depends on how the contract with the customers is. Sometimes the customer procures all the licenses and gives them to us and sometimes we resell the licenses. It completely varies from customer to customer.

We have a strategic partnership with Microsoft and a lot of our customers also are Microsoft shops.

We use both cloud and on-prem deployments. It's a mixed kind of a situation, depending on the customer scenario and situation. We have some implementations that are on the cloud and there are some older installations, legacy installations, which are on-prem. That is also giving us an opportunity to move them to the cloud. Most of our customers are looking to move to the cloud slowly and gradually. I anticipate that we will be seeing more cloud-based installations going forward.

There are one-off scenarios where the customer has an interesting mix of cloud platforms. They might have an IoT platform that is deployed on AWS, and that data is coming to the data lake and being visualized using Power BI, however, not necessarily on Azure.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

I mostly work in the oil and gas industry. Microsoft BI is primarily associated with surveillance, optimization, product, and forecasting-related items. While I am not currently using Microsoft BI, I have prior experience, and in my current position, I am guiding the team on a larger scale. I don't use it myself frequently, but I am the lead for that team, and when I do use it, I use it for reporting purposes.

Microsoft BI has a multitude of additional features. Overall it's an EDA tool, from which you can extract, transform, and load data. You can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources.

When I compare other analytical tools to Microsoft BI, I believe Microsoft BI is far more accurate, and the frequency is also better.

It has additional features, which are very much useful. The most important thing I like is that it is just a data platform connecting to the overall process and it can be utilized in any sector.

Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included. When we use engineering models linked to Microsoft BI or Salesforce, the engineering models are from a third-party application.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for the last three and a half years.

We are using the latest update.

I have used it both on-premises and on the cloud.

In terms of stability, I have seen some cases where it is difficult as well as some cases where it is very easy. Overall, it is a stable and reliable product.

It is easy to scale Microsoft BI.

We have a larger team. Microsoft BI specifically, is not limited to any subset or any team. I believe we have 1,000 plus users in my company currently who are using this application.

I have been in touch with the technical team, but not specifically for Microsoft BI. Based on my experience with Microsft technical support, I would rate them a four out of five.

Technical support is pretty decent.

I use a variety of tools, including Salesforce, and I have developed a number of Python-based tools.

The initial setup was simple. However, when I did it the first time, it was complex. Once I understood the process it was simple.

My field was small due to the type of setup required. I scheduled it for one week, during which we also tested.

Definitely, it requires maintenance in terms of quality checking of the data, as well as whether or not the run times or schedules are working properly.

I had some assistance when I deployed the first time, but I am now able to complete the deployment on my own.

In terms of licensing, I've never worked on the contractual side of their license. However, I believe that the number of licenses currently in use is appropriate for our organization. It also adds value to the team. I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable.

I have not used it on the mobile app. I'm not sure how Microsoft BI works on a mobile app. 

Mobile apps are sometimes third-party apps that are difficult to configure and use. As a result, mobile apps are something that will be required in the future, upcoming data transformation.

Before implementing Microsoft BI or any other analytical tool, we must first understand the domain. Basically, how the data is linked, what data you want to transform, and what output you need for the finished product. Then you proceed with your deployment in a sequential manner. It will be very simple.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. I haven't explored many other items that are feasible or possible, or the analytical part of Microsoft BI's functionality, which I haven't personally used, so there's a gap. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

For the most part, clients require dashboards. We are developing quite a few dashboards for them.

The solution has improved a lot within the organization. We can view chunks of data and detailed data at various levels. 

When we have done training in the cloud previously, I have a long experience in BI tools. I've worked on Cognos BI, Informatica, and other tools including QlikView. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

There are some great automation elements in the product.

It's a good tool and designing dashboards is easy.

In SAP, we have a suite of components here in a single module. This includes forecasting and budgeting. There's also a smart answers section. Whenever we design any chart or something, the tool provides some information regarding that data. That would be quite a good feature that could be included in future versions of Microsoft BI.

The licensing could be a bit better.

You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI.

I've used the solution for about one year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. I haven't had issues with it crashing or freezing.

The scalability is great. If you need to expand the product, you can do so. You can easily add more users. 

I'm not sure how many users are using the product. 

Technical support is great. I've worked with them before and have been happy with their level of service. 

I've previously used Cognos BI. I've also had the opportunity to work with SAP.

I haven't got any opportunity to install any Power BI system. That said, for tutorial purposes, I have installed the desktop version in my system. It was very smooth.

It took 30 to 40 minutes for me to install the desktop version. During my learning phase, I prepared one dashboard. Similar to when I worked on Cognos BI, there were some features that we have to hard code and incorporate manually. There is some automation in Power BI. For example, if we are designing some interactive things we have to write code possibly. Still, even having to write code, in Power BI, was a very smooth experience.

We have people on our team that can handle maintenance tasks. 

We had a team of five to six people that handled the implementation in-house.

The client is continuing to use it, likely due to the fact that they see some sort of ROI. However, I don't have exact metrics. 

I'd prefer if the licensing was a bit better.

The customers need to pay the licensing fee. I can't speak to the exact pricing for their contract.

Typically, the solution architect is the one who decides which tool to use. However, we also were there and had a brainstorming session before choosing the tools. We did look at open-source options. At the time I prepared one checklist comparison between all the tools available in the market. Those included SAP, QlikView, and Tableau.

We are an integrator and a partner. We are providing support activities to one of our clients.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We have many use cases, from creating full ETL workloads for supporting some dashboards to only building dashboards by themselves. For example, there is one stage where we had to do some data integration from several sources to assess the quality of the data that we are consuming for our projects. We had to ingest data and convert it using Power BI, which is useful but isn't the best ETL tool, and I understand that that is not its purpose. Finally, we built out a schema model and built reports upon that. It's a full project. 

We also have another project, where we are attempting to do some incremental refresh because we are ingesting a lot of data from lake sources and SQL sources. We are doing direct query and applying some optimization from Synapse.

I am currently using the latest version of Power BI.

The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything.

Something that everyone has suggested and that we are currently implementing and testing is the ability to export tables with the same format. That is something many customers were seeking, and right now it is possible to do that. Focusing on table support is a huge opportunity.

One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.

When you try to process a lot of data from one million records, it breaks. The computer runs out of CPU and memory. It's terrible, but I know it's not its main purpose, so that would be my suggestion.

It's stable, but the desktop is not so stable. I have experienced several crashes. I would say there is a lot of opportunity for improvement on that.

A couple of people are needed for deployment and maintenance. You always need a developer who is proficient on Power Query and maybe some other DevOps guy who sets up the pipeline. So, maybe two people at most. It's very easy.

Scalability on the ETL side is not so good. When you run the workloads on service, you can fail almost anything, but it's not exactly the best for scaling.

On the virtualization side, I would say it's good.

I haven't actually needed much technical support. I know there are forums and people respond, but I haven't really sought that out. There is so much documentation online, there are books online, and there are YouTube channels from guys that provide solutions to issues and to some other stuff. The community is very proficient.

It is very easy. Even non-IT professionals use it and deliver value to the company.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is to just jump right into it, download the Power BI desktop and start looking at YouTube channels. There are lots of people who have made wonderful things on YouTube.

I'm a call center consultant and I use Microsoft BI to receive in-depth metrics. I download the metrics from the contact center and then I can figure out what's going on in the contact center. Additionally, if we integrate it with other tools and databases, et cetera, we can receive a better understanding of what is happening. For example, we had a customer that made products for Costco and Walmart and if they had an engineering issue or a problem, they don't find out about it until they saw the orders from the engineering team explaining what the issue was.

We added a screen to the agent's desktop and listed the model numbers of the products and then used Microsoft BI analytics to see what particular problem happened to what product. The executive could drill down and hear the calls as to what the customer was saying about the issue.

The executives liked the data, the engineers liked hearing what the customers were saying about the certain product that had an issue.

Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau.

You can set Microsoft BI up for administration to use it and then you can set up views for your end-users to look at. For example, if you are a report analyst you could have your marketing person wants Microsoft BI to report on how many widgets the East Coast sold in five years, if you set Microsoft BI up the right way, they can retrieve that information themselves. You save manpower from your IT staff.

Microsoft BI is a lot easier to analyze data than with other solutions, such as Excel.

I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately one year.

I have found Microsoft BI is stable. 

I have not had any issues. I am a new user myself, and I typically suggest an application that I have found good and then somebody else that I work with, would set it up.

The solution has been scalable for what I use it for.

I have not used technical support.

I have used Tableau.

The initial setup is very easy because it is on the cloud. You only need to have your database and connect it to Microsoft BI. They have different connectors in order to make it easy to do.

I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution.

The solution has all the features I need, I do not use large data sets.

I rate Microsoft BI a ten out of ten.