Microsoft Power BI Reviews

It is one of the business intelligence tools we are using—mainly for all our data visualization purposes and building interactive dashboards. We use Microsoft Power BI to generate all different types of analytic reports. We move information from our data warehouse to a SSAS cube that we've built on top of all our dimensions. We also do a certain level of aggregation in the cube itself, which is then connected to Power BI.

It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well.  

I would like to see Microsoft BI add custom visuals and certain machine-learning capabilities. It would be nice if the DAX functions could perform some kind of predictive modeling. Right now, it just does a kind of descriptive analytics.

I've been working on Microsoft Power BI for three years. 

Throughout several updates over the past three years, I never saw any issues, particularly with installation or anything, so I see the product as stable.

I feel that scalability is one area where there is room for improvement. When there is a huge volume of data, like when we apply the aggregation, the reporting slows down. That's why we mostly build things in the SSAS cube itself instead of bringing it back to Microsoft BI to do the aggregation. Certain incredibly small aggregations can be done on the Microsoft BI side, but if the dashboard size is more than 1 Gigabyte, you start to see some performance issues. 

The Power BI community is really big, so we mostly rely on other users for support.

In some projects, we have used Tableau or ThoughtSpot. If we're dealing with big data, then we often consider using Tableau. Power BI has some additional features that Tableau doesn't have, like DAX and Power Query, but Tableau works better from a scalability standpoint. Sometimes for reporting purposes, when we want to generate some kind of dashboard on the fly for the user, we have used ThoughtSpot. 

We didn't experience any complications. We built everything on the desktop and in the .pvi files, then just move those files to the server. Afterward, we didn't see any issues at all in terms of setup.

I'm unsure about the exact cost, but the Pro license comes out to around $10 per user. There are also additional costs for custom visuals that you can pay for.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. 

We are using this solution for analytic dashboards.

The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well. 

When it comes to security Microsoft BI can integrate well with Microsoft Domain Services, you are able to make it as secure as you want.

There are useful visualizations available in the dashboards.

If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3.

In a future release, they need to have better integration to allow any visualization that is done in other solutions, such as D3 or Tableau, to be able to be imported in Microsoft BI easily.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.

The solution is stable when the database is reasonably sized. If you have large databases of 20 million rows it can begin to have difficulties requiring a purchase of more hardware.

The scalability is good. If you have a direct query, Microsoft BI can run on billions of rows of data.

Microsoft BI is available to the 70,000 users in my organization.

This solution is used extensively because everyone has access to it, not because it is the best.

The support from Microsoft could improve.

The solution is easy to install.

We did the implementation of the solution.

For those customers we have that use Microsoft BI on a dedicated server, we have a technical team that does the maintenance.

I have evaluated Tableau and D3.

I would recommend Microsoft BI over Tableau if you are comfortable with Microsoft solutions. Additionally, understand your use case and choose the best solution that fits your needs.

I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.

I'm a project manager and we are customers of Microsoft.

I like the toggling feature, the ability to switch from one page to another. 

I have a couple of dashboards that are weekly and monthly. I was able to download the dashboard, but I cannot paste any images into PowerPoint. There are also visuals based on the brand that should automatically pop up in the graph and which should be a toggling option. And I'm having performance issues if I want to add two or three tables at a time, which I could easily do in Tableau. Copy-pasting data to PowerPoint for presentation to the executive level should be easy but we're only able to copy the visual, not the underlying data. 

I've been using this solution for the past eight months. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't yet migrated everyone to Power BI. Our users are not finding Power BI as good as Pique, which perhaps they're just more used to. They're trying but some of the features available in Pique are not there so they are not comprehensively using it. It's being used mainly for internal analysis for now. 

We initially used Tableau because our data was an internal data source, and now all of our data is migrated to tool environments, that the Power BI is more comfortable with. BI is also a free product which is another reason the company recommends it.

The initial setup was straightforward, we have a Power BI admin team who take care of all that. 

Because of performance issues and because we're unable to do all the aggregation, I rate this solution six out of 10. 

The solution is basically used for data. It's on a proprietary piece of equipment on which we collect data. We look at impurities in molten metal, and it's a database and it keeps track of all the batches that we have through the furnace that we have. It tells when it's dirty and stuff like that. It's a large database that we keep track of the history of all the ingots that we run.

The solution serves its purpose. When you have the recurring cost every year on this other project, Qlik Sense didn't fit with it as you'd have to have Qlik Sense plus something else. 

As long as you don't need the data in real-time, it's okay.

The solution is stable.

We have found the product to be scalable. 

We looked at it for these two new projects too, however, we needed more real-time data on this other project and so it wasn't a good solution and we thought Qlik Sense would work better.

If you need data in real-time, it's not an ideal solution.

I've dealt with the solution for about a year or so at this point.

From what I have seen, the solution seems to be very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability of the product has been fine. We can expand it if we want to.

I've never contacted technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

We have more of an industrial type application and we're going to have Tulip interface with Qlik Sense or we're just going to use Domo's platform. Domo is more expensive, a little bit more expensive, however, one of my colleagues here already used Domo and he really liked it, so we're gearing towards Domo. We haven't purchased it yet.

We looked at Qlik Sense. However, when you have the recurring cost every year on this other project, Qlik Sense didn't fit with it because you'd have to have Qlik Sense plus something else.

Our corporate office may have some sort of agreement with Microsoft. We're just an end-user.

Corporate is kind of pushing Microsoft BI, and they have questions about using it for this project, however, we had an IT consultant that said it's not a good solution.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's not ideal for every application, however, it works pretty well.

We are software developers. We generate data using the basic data connectors that Microsoft provides. We just follow the importing and exporting data around, the Azure platform.

We are doing C# development. We use an SQL server, and we use Power BI. Those are the main three technologies, and then it's just Microsoft to put it together.

We use this solution to create business intelligence reports for the executive users of our applications. We are creating standard business applications like ERP and CRM and e-commerce type applications. Then, we extract a sample of the data, build a simple data warehouse, in the Power BI service, and create some BI reports.

The data visualisation is very attractive from the user's point of view. Users see their reports and think "Wow - that is amazing". 

However, it is much harder to prepare data for reporting. I would say 95% of your development time is spent gathering, cleaning, and modelling data. However once that is done reporting is easy.

The capacity needs improvement. It is limited in its capacity in power.

Some of its features are incredibly difficult to understand. There is a learning curve to do the more sophisticated things. For example, paginated reports are complicated. But in general, Power BI, it's not an end-user tool, however much Microsoft pretended it is. We just treat it is like another tool that we use and we deliver the reports to our clients.

The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually. It should be one of the admin features of Microsoft BI.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for 15 months.

We are using the latest version.

It is a reliable solution. 

I haven't tried to scale it, but in theory, I know that is capable. Power BI Premium is easy to scale as long as you have the money.

Inside the business, we only have one user, and outside the business, we have our clients where we have four developers who use this solution.

Our clients are medium-sized companies with 50 to 100 users.

I have not contacted technical support. Google provides the information that we need.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It can take a couple of hours to deploy the gateways, then there is the development of it.

It doesn't require maintenance, but we are forever enhancing the reports. In general, it works without problems.

We are developers, we can complete the installation ourselves.

We view it as an expensive product. 

Most of our clients cannot afford the premium capacity. 

We just make do with Power BI pro features, which is always a big shame because we know that the premium version has a lot of features that we would like to use, and are not available to us.

There are a few different licensing models.

It ends up being complicated and people don't like paying for things. It's okay if you're working for a large corporation because they can obviously spend thousands of pounds every month on licenses, but our customers cannot.

Licensing is paid on a monthly basis.

Power BI has approximately 20 new features that come out every month. You just have to be patient and eventually, the features come out.

My advice to others would be to do your homework. It's one of those things where you have to get past the marketing. The marketing message is not helpful.

I would suggest that if you are going to use Power BI, you need to use developers who understand what it can do, what it can't do, and how it works. 

Then they will then guide you to say, this is the type of report you can expect. 

It took me a long time to realize what you can and cannot do with Power BI.

That's why I suggest doing your homework first. It's not as wonderful as Microsoft pretends it to be, but it's not bad, and I am not knocking it, but you have to cut out all the hype that comes with it.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

I use Microsoft BI for the reports and our displaying the data in different ways. As a project manager, I need to follow the budget and receive confirmation about our projects. We have an SAP database and we follow and check all the budget data of the project including data usage.

What I have found valuable about Microsoft BI is its performance and ease of use. The interface is very simple and it is accessible to everyone. If someone is new to this type of solution it is straightforward to understand.

The solution could improve by having more options to manipulate the views of the data on the dashboards. I sometimes need to make them myself but there should be more customizable with drag-and-drop elements and filters on that data differently than it was designed. There are filters in the design stage but there are times you need something else other than how it was designed. For example, if you did not have some of the information at the time of the design. Having the ability to design, or request the data from the database as an end-user is very important. It would be beneficial to have more autonomy on the design of the requested data. You are not able to change the fields or the request data because it was done in the backend and you are not able to see how that request happened. Sometimes you need to make your own requests or have different requests regarding the data. We do not have access because we are not administrators.

In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

I have found it to be scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 people using the solution in my organization.

I have previously used QlikView and Qlik Sense.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

I've been a consultant, so I've built some reports for some clients. I use and prefer its desktop version. 

It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau.

At the enterprise level, it is a little expensive. To get the full capacity of integrations, you need to go premium.

It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases. 

I've been in the Business Intelligence Industry for about seven years. I use this product off and on.

It is complex to scale. There are just too many things you have to put in place. You got to have the gateways, and you got to have the premium service. There are a lot of components that get involved. It is not very straightforward. 

We sell our own BI tool. So, we have hundreds of clients. They are mid-sized organizations. We're building out our Power BI stack because people do like it, but right now, we have most of our stuff in Tableau.

I also use Tableau. They're very comparable products. I worked for different companies that built their own proprietary stuff, and mainly for visualization, Tableau and Power BI were the connectors to go to. So, there wasn't a switch.

I really like Tableau's web version over Power BI's web version. It is just easier to drag and drop things and blend data on the backend. It has a little simpler process in that regard. I don't like the charting in Tableau. Its charting is a little more complex than Power BI's charting.

Calculations are a little harder in Tableau. They can be a little more complex in Tableau as compared to Power BI. Tableau is a little more detailed in terms of creating calculations. You can't just add two columns together. Tableau should have the ability to add or subtract columns. They should make it like a wizard.

The simple stuff is easy. When you want to get into the calculations and building DAX-type formulas, I don't think DAX is that great. I find Tableau's coding a little easier.

Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive. 

I would advise others to just do their research and figure out what they want to do with it so that they know if it is going to be hard or easy.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of 10.

The visualization part and its inclusion in a cloud-based application are valuable features. 

The solution is somewhat costly in comparison with MSBI tools. 

In MSBI, when it comes to mobile and maps-related applications, we are always looking for some support with the reporting tools. Once we click on the region, then automatically it goes to the two area maps. Based on the map, it will reinforce our data values. There is constant change involved and new updates and enhancements are coming out as needed in new versions. 

The solution performs well and is stable. 

The scalability is very good and use of the application is flexible. 

We can create certain tickets, contact them and explain our requirements and they will look into the issue and help us to find a workaround for us to implement. They will address the issue in the next version. 

We are very satisfied with their support. 

We are implementers of this solution and maintain the visualization on the reporting parts, as well as fulfill the business requirements. 

The solution is less expensive than other PowerBI tools, but more so than those of MSBI. 

The solution is less expensive than other PowerBI tools, which is why most people go with it, although it does cost more than MSBI tools. It has good feasibility for fulfilling one's business needs. PowerBI is very strong in the market at the moment and we are creating visualization that works. It is a stable tool, as well. 

While PowerBI is cloud-based, it can be used both on-and-off-premises. MSBI can also be implemented on-premises. PowerBI mostly involves visualization. 

I rate Microsoft BI as an eight out of ten.