Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Enterprise reporting and digitization of dashboards using Microsoft Power BI, SSRS and Azure Reporting DB by integrating several applications to establish single version of truth.

Microsoft BI stack is very easy to use and most of the developer versions are free such as Power BI, DAX, SQL Server Development Edition. This helped us quick prototyping to generate value of data resting in silos. 

What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel. It is very compatible with Excel tools, and anybody who works with Excel can learn and use Power BI quickly. 

Writing formulas and data transformation are good features.

The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version of Power BI. They should have versions for both Apple and Unix because you cannot install the desktop version for these operating systems.

In the future, I would like to see them add more AI and machine learning features, as well as self-service analytics.

You can use R and Python, but it would be helpful if they had some no-code machine learning options that you find in other tools.

The UI/UX can be improved. Products such as Tableau and QlikView are very good in terms of the user interface.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years, on and off.

I have not found any issues with respect to stability. Microsoft has invested a lot and they are continuing to invest in Power BI.

Given that there is a server version for services that can be used to implement and roll out reports at the organizational level, it's scalable.

In my current organization, I am training 15 people on how to use it and I am looking to expand to 50 users.

Microsoft support is quick. We also have a dedicated partner for support, and they are good.

Positive

Prior to incorporate Power BI in the stack, we were using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS) only. They do not have any visualization interface, but you can do static reporting. This is the reason that we are switching. Probably, we will use SSRS and Azure SQL at the backend, but there won't be used as the visualization tool.

For visualization, we used to use Excel. Which not reliable. 

The installation is easy. The download takes perhaps five minutes, depending on the bandwidth. Overall, it can be downloaded and installed within half an hour and no training is required.

The desktop version is used for development and the cloud version is used to submit a report. Essentially, it is Power BI Desktop and Power BI Services. The desktop version is what is on-premises.

You can deploy yourself but of course, in an office, you require an administrator.

The cost of this product is very low, at approximately $8 or $9 per month for a developer. It is the cheapest of all of the visualization tools. They have a 30-day trial available for you to try it.

For personal use, this product is free to use.

Tableau is a little bit expensive, although it is good if they want a very sophisticated solution. Both Tableau and QlikView are a little better in terms of the user interface.

You need a technical team to operate the solution. You need people for the administration of the data connection and data integration. They should be skilled in SQL, data management, and so forth. Typically, these are data engineers.

We plan to continue using Microsoft BI. We are onboarding and implementing organization-wide for our long-term strategy, and the entire organization will be using Power BI.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is easy to learn, especially for somebody who is good at Excel. Other tools are easy to use as well but if you are a Windows user then Power BI is a good option.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are using Power BI for reporting.

It is very good, and it supports the Microsoft ecosystem, including Excel, etc.

We have been using it only for a couple of months, and we are at the beginning of our learning. The area of improvement is difficult to say. The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective.

I have been using this solution for a couple of months.

It is stable.

We are not sure because we currently have a simple installation on the PC, but the idea is to scale it via Office 365 cloud implementation.

It seems suitable for small, medium, and large enterprises. It should be able to scale up. Based on the marketing slides, it should be able to handle all kinds of enterprises.

We have not had any problems, so we had no requirement to use technical support. 

It is quite easy. You just need to install a program and use the connectors and drivers, and that's it. 

I did it myself.

We are end-users, and we don't take care of the prices and accounting. We get a product and pay the fee to our internal service provider, but its price should be reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it.

We are not very experienced in it. So, I don't know if I can recommend it, but we are using it because it is very good.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

The solution is very powerful and very flexible. 

It is very easy to set up and you can connect it to multiple systems very easily.

They keep on upgrading, performance-wise. 

Power BI is very fast; they have improved Power BI a lot in general over time. YOu can see the difference. 

The stability is great and continues to get better and better.

The pricing is pretty good.

They should provide some kind of extra visual. There are a lot of third-party companies that provide these visuals, however, it would be better if, instead of relying on a third party, they could have their own. We should have by default in the package itself, some good visuals.

Technical support could be a bit better.

The performance could be enhanced in the sense that there is a limitation of the volume of data that it can hold. 

While they have some different options out there, they did not improve anything when you connect to any dataset, when you have to import. You need to connect online, meaning live.  

You cannot create so many things on the Power BI side, such as adding a new column, which is not possible in your live reporting, direct query option. In contrast, with the import method, you can do so many things. They need to improve on the direct query option side.

The product is stable. I have seen a lot of improvements in the stability of their application lately. If you compare what's available now to the last three to four years back, you can see it's more stable.

It's scalable and it scales quickly. Nowadays, being on the cloud, expanding is very easy.

While support is okay, they need to improve it a lot. Of course, they're improving as we speak, yet, I would say, if you can ask me the ratings, I would still say it's still rather low and good - not great.

I'm also familiar with SAP, which doesn't scale as well. SAP also is much more expensive. SAP is a big product, whereas Microsoft BI is much smaller. They only overlap in terms of the analytics cloud and the SAP goes above and beyond and offers many, many more things. 

The pricing is fair. They give you many options by splitting up the licensing. They have multiple types of licenses out there based on your usage. You can increase your pricing if you use it a bit more, however, it's still quite reasonable as compared to SAP. 

We are a customer and end-user. We are not a Microsoft (or SAP) partner.

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

Power BI is used internally to track indicators like KPI, sales, and a bunch of other essential metrics for our company's strategic planning. Power BI creates reports and compiles data coming from various sources, and we create dashboards for managers and executives to monitor these indicators.

There is also an external use case. We also have a team that provides BI as a service. Let's say your company collects all your data manually in Excel sheets and creates reports. We get rid of the Excel files and automate everything using Power BI to create dashboards and reports.

Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Power BI in the past couple of years, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, Integration is one area they could work on. They are adding more integration with other Microsoft tools, but I would like it if they sped up the process.

We've been a Microsoft partner for 12 years.

Microsoft Bi is stable. 

Microsoft BI is scalable. 

Power BI has strong support from Microsoft. If you need help, they answer promptly. There are also several discussion groups where you can get information, like the product roadmap and any new things coming up. 

Everything is in the cloud, so you don't do anything. You only need to download a client, and that's it. If you have to create an embedded solution, it only takes five minutes.

The entire deployment takes a couple of hours, but you don't need a specialist to deploy it. Obviously, you need someone who understands the technology and how to follow instructions, but it's pretty straightforward stuff.

Power BI's price is good relative to its competitors. It has more than 400 or 500 different connectors. A lower price would always be welcome. The price is fine, but the licensing is complicated. Quantum mechanics is easier to understand than Microsoft licensing.

I rate Microsoft BI nine out of 10. If you are thinking about using Microsoft BI, go for it. Microsoft BI is worth it. It's one of the products Microsoft got right from the beginning. It's perfect.

We are using this tool for management reporting.

One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. If I compare this tool with Tableau, there are a lot of things which I cannot do in Microsoft Power BI that I can do in Tableau.

I've been using Microsoft Power BI for five years.

Microsoft Power BI is a very stable tool.

Microsoft Power BI is a scalable tool.

As we are using the cloud service of this tool, the initial setup for it is fine.

I pay for the Microsoft Power BI license on a yearly basis.

I was able to evaluate Tableau.

I've been using these BI (business intelligence) tools: Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.

I'm somewhat satisfied with the performance of Microsoft Power BI.

We've all been using Microsoft Power BI in the company, from the time it was introduced.

For the deployment and maintenance of this tool, we have a team of 20 who are currently in charge of full-time development. These are the users who are the main developers. Scalability will be for the end users, e.g. the business users, and could be increased to more than 2,000.

I've contacted the Microsoft Power BI technical support team a lot of times.

I'm recommending this tool to others who want to start using it.

On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating Microsoft Power BI a seven.

We are using Microsoft BI for data analysis.

Microsoft BI's most valuable features are the user interface, which is easy to use and light.

The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.

The stability is okay, but the real-time integration is lacking.

The scalability of Microsoft BI is fine.

We have approximately 45 people using the solution. We do not use the solution daily, but we use it frequently.

We have not contacted technical support.

Before we were using Microsoft BI we used Tableau and an open-sourced solution called PHP.

We ended up switching to Microsoft BI because it has proper tools, easy to use, and is user-friendly.

The initial setup of Microsoft BI was not complex. The deployment took a long while with our twin databases.

We did the implementation in-house.

The price of Microsoft BI is expensive. We found the price of Tableau to be less expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others because it is easy to use and can be customized.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We are providing BI services to clients in India who are using Microsoft BI. We are able to provide the clients with data-driven decisions by the use of the reports that we are creating using Microsoft BI. The reports are usually graphical and intuitive.

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.

Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense.

I have used Microsoft BI within the past 12 months.

The stability of Microsoft BI is stable.

Microsoft BI is a scalable solution. Here in India, it is a popular tool for people to implement.

The client that we are working with has approximately 500 to 600 users.

The support from Microsoft is helpful. If you're facing any sort of issue or error, you can raise it to the Microsoft BI community.

We work on a very concise team of three to four members for the deployment. We will be requiring only a data engineer, Microsft BI developer, business analyst, and project manager. 

If the user requirement is high, we can increase the number of members in the team. However, if you have a team of four, then you can deploy the project. A minimum of four people is required.

For its maintenance of Microsoft BI, you require only two people. If there are some backend data issues, then you will require a data engineer. However, if the issue is related to the frontend or BI report, then you only need one developer for that.

My advice is for the companies who want to make data-driven decisions or to share the report with the security feature in it, they should opt for Microsoft BI services.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

We are using it, for instance, to figure out some indicators in regards to our students including the number of students, which are graduating, et cetera.

The initial setup was pretty simple. 

The solution runs without issues. It's been problem-free.

We have found the product very stable and reliable.

The scalability seems to be fine for us. 

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. 

I've used the solution for about three to six months or so.

The stability has been good. There aren't bugs or glitches really. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's pretty reliable. 

For our use case, the solution offers reasonable scalability. We haven't run into issues. 

We have 40 to 50 people using the product right now. They are across different roles. 

I'm not sure if we have a plan to increase usage at this time. We likely will not.

I haven't had a need to reach out to technical support as it's largely been problem-free. I can't speak to how they would be for support. I do not know if they are helpful or responsive. 

We found the initial implementation process to be straightforward and simple. It's not overly complex or difficult. 

I cannot recall the exact amount of time it actually took to deploy the product.

I'm an end-user. However, I'm not sure which exact version of the solution we're using. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've largely been very satisfied with its capabilities.