Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Microsoft Power BI is a very powerful tool. It allows us to extract data from Excel or Share Point. 

We can send various project reports from the dashboard to management. It allows us to set up our own preferences. 

We can work with all sorts of data from the previous year or two. With that native data, we can have everything in one dashboard that accurately reflects the reporting. The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible. 

The solution has been very stable so far.

We find the product to be quite scalable. 

It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI. I'm not from the IT background, and I've been given the license to use the Power BI, however, I find that the support and video demos from Microsoft are not really helpful for me. I don't handle Microsoft BI 24/7. My working time isn't dedicated to using it and learning it. I need it for certain tasks and trying to wrap my head around it, while also handling other duties is difficult. There's too much of a learning curve for beginners.

The cost of the solution is high.

We originally started our migration back at the end of 2019. We've used it for a year or two now.

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

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem. 

Right now, in our organization, only 15 of us have the full license for the Power BI Pro. Not everyone in the office actually uses it. However, we have over 1,000 people using various other Microsoft products in our company.

As I am not technical, I did not handle the initial setup. We have IT personnel within our organization that handled it. I just gave them my laptop, and they just installed it for me. Occasionally, they can also do it remotely from their office to our office. I never touch it. We just open the apps from the desktop. The process, when do that way, i's quite convenient. It's quite easy for end-users.

We have our own IT team that handles the installation. They either take the laptop or do the installation remotely. In either case, it's handled in-house and not by integrators or consultants. 

The solution is quite expensive. 

I'm an end-user of the product, however, I'm not overly technical or in IT.

We have a custom Microsoft setup. We are using a few apps from Microsoft, such as the Microsoft Plan, and we are using Power BI, Power Automate, et cetera. It's all from Microsoft, and it is part of our IT infrastructure. When we combine it together, it is a project and portfolio management solution. It is not a commercial, off-the-shelf product. 

I'm not sure which version number we are using. 

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

In terms of Microsoft Power BI, for all people who need to do their own reporting or want to visualize their daily work or tasks, in terms of projection, giving others a view on what they are doing, it's a very good tool. It allows users to show projections of what we are doing. Users can grab statistics, which is quite convenient, and understand what they are doing from a visual perspective, which we find quite useful.

We use Microsoft BI typically to clean up data in Excel, as well as to create reports for my supervisor that will be analyzed and then used to draw conclusions.

It provides the common ground for data to be cleaned. We use this for everyone to work on cleaning up data in order to use it for visualizations, which has been helpful.

The transforming data before you start with the visualization comes in pretty handy.

It is quite easy to use and it helps me to achieve the projects that I've been assigned.

I have never had the inability to perform the tasks I've been assigned with the software. 

It's very useful because you can create helpful reports, which assist you to analyze data in a very organized way.

I feel the modeling page should be simplified. The links between different parts of your data, on the models' page, are a bit confusing. It was difficult for me to learn. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for three months.

We are using an older version specific to the organization.

Microsoft BI is a stable product.

Microsoft BI is quite scalable, especially with the number of coding languages that are available to use.

We have approximately 23 data scientists in our organization who are using this solution. We use it extensively.

We are mostly using Microsoft BI but we are trying to bring in Tableau and maximize the potential of both.

I have not contacted technical support.

I also have experience with Tableau.

When I arrived, this solution was already set up.

For others who want to start using Microsoft BI, I would say go through some tutorials on your own first and then try and practice with practice data sets that are available online. Also, feel free to play around with the different tools, and the different visualizations, because you can use them differently for different things.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution.

It is quite flexible for reporting purposes.

This solution is resource-heavy. I would like to see it consume fewer resources. When I use it on my laptop, it consumes a lot of resources.

I have used this solution within the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version.

It can scale easily.

We have more than 50 people who are using this solution in my company. Across the company, most are in marketing and finance.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle BI and Oracle OBIEE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It would be better if the price was cheaper.

I would recommend this solution and suggest they use it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I mainly use it for sales analysis. We are in the telecom industry, so on a daily basis, we see a couple of trends in the number of activations of customers and registration, the performance of the dealer, and items like that.

Its integration with the Microsoft Office Suite is great. I can easily connect it to any of the Excel or any CSV files, and I can immediately create a dashboard. 

It's like the higher level of pivot tables. For the people who mainly use Excel, this is like an advanced version. This is much more flexible and I don't have to train people to use it, as it's very user-friendly compared to Qlik. Qlik needs some expertise and a layman cannot immediately go to Qlik and do stuff unless he understands it. When it comes to Power BI it's a five minutes tutorial, he can definitely understand what needs to be done.

The solution is stable and scalable. So far I don't have any issues, however, it depends on the amount of data we use. I'm just running it on my PC.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is free as it's bundled with Office 365.

Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik. 

They could also improve the mobile experience. If people are using this mobile app for BI, they need better performance there. The rendering of the objects, for example, if you create the dashboard on Power BI when someone sees that on the app, it comes in a different format. They can do some enhancements there to standardize it.

Once we expand it as a centralized repository, if I could find much more use cases, that would be ideal. However, now it's very limited in our organization.

We don't use the solution filly and don't yet have a license for it. That said, I've had the chance to work with it for more than a year now.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and we don't have any trouble with it crashing or freezing. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

My understanding is that the solution is scalable. 

I can easily load a billion rows in less than two or three minutes and play around with it. However, I haven't tested on big data files or anything like that.

Right now, we don't have too many users. It's just three to four people as of now, as our primary BI tool is still Qlik Sense. It's only for ad hoc use cases we use Power BI, and just myself and a couple of team members, as well as the BI specialist, that access it.

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. If I run into issues, I tend to Google solutions to find answers to my questions. YouTube is also a good resource if you need information.

We currently use Qlik Sense as our BI product.

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's simple and straightforward. 

It took, 10 to 15 minutes, if I remember correctly, to set everything up. It's just a .exe file installing. It's not hard and it's pretty fast.

We did not need a consultant or an integrator to handle the implementation. I just played around a bit with it.

We don't have a license on Power BI, so we don't publish anything. It's mainly for some ad hoc use cases that we use Power BI format.

Power BI is free; it comes with Office 365.

I've currently looked at MicroStrategy and am in the process of comparing a few other products.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We are using Power BI, however, not to the full scale. It's still unlicensed as of now, and I'm using desktop versions only.

I don't remember the version, as it comes with Office 365. I didn't give a thought to the version.

From my experience with the desktop version, I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

From my experience, I'd recommend the solution to others. 

We have a startup focused on analytics around sports and athletes' performance. The data sits in our platform called Hercules, which is exposed through an ODBC connector or API layer. We're currently building a connector to expose that data in a consumable way, inside Power BI (with one connector for Tableau as well). 

I love the fact that it's got a very intuitive user interface. 

I like the fact that you can create aggregations and view measures and metrics on the fly. 

I like the visuals themselves as all of our customers are moving away from Excel and this gives them a very unique way to have their data represented in a more visual manner with active slicing and dicing data right there, with the time dimensions and different dimensions. 

I also like the automatic refresh mechanism that it can do. You can have the data refresh automatically every 30 minutes, for example.

The initial setup is pretty simple. 

The stability has been pretty good.

The solution can scale.

Technical support has been great.

Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now.

When you're building, the documentation sucks. It's a painful experience to find out how to do things inside the connector framework. 

I don't like the fact that they need to have a premium excuse to manage larger sets of data. On top of that, there are limitations in building a custom connector. If you want to build a custom connector for your customers, the navigation is flawed. For example, when I build a custom connector to talk to Power BI and report, I want some contextual data of the report, and I want to have what we call incremental refresh. However, incremental refresh right now is only supported in a SQL-based backend. It's not supported for API-based connectors. That's something that we really, really want. We only try to work around it.

Basically, I would love to see that incremental refresh with API-based connectors. I'd also want the report-based contextual information available inside the connector.

The licensing is very confusing.

I've been using the solution since about 2014. I've used it for many years at this point.

We've found the stability to be fine so far. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's easy to scale if you have the premium model. We just started exploring that right now.

The clients we have that use it are medium-sized businesses. These are basically soccer clubs or sports clubs, who are internally using it. however, we want to give it to a larger audience. We haven't gone there yet, though likely we will in the future.

Technical support has been awesome. they are helpful and responsive and we are more than satisfied with the level of service we receive from them.

I also use Tableau. I've used Power BI to a larger extent than Tableau, however, we have a startup in which we have an audience on BI and we are doing research to see how many of them are on Tableau versus Power BI.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We started with Power BI because that was one of our device partner's tools of choice. However, we are trying to support Tableau and Power BI now.

The setup was pretty straightforward. I mean the setup for the Power BI Desktop. The download is pretty straightforward. Once you get to do more complex things with it, using the gateway and things like that, then it gets a little complex. On top of that, the documentation is difficult. It's there, however, it's difficult to find.

The licensing is a little convoluted, and not easy to take advantage of. You're able to scale it in the premium model. However, they are very different versions. There's a difficulty in understanding which one of them applies to you and what the costs would be eventually, and what the performance and thresholds are for each one. The documentation might be there, however, for a small company, in order to find out all the aspects of licensing it's not that easy.

We've also evaluated Tableau and we use both right now.

We are in the startup program for Microsoft.

I'm on the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

It's deployed on the cloud for automatic refreshment service and it's got a gateway on-prem.

It's a very good tool to quickly get started and it does scale, however, as you get into the larger deployments and at a larger scale, it's better to involve a Power BI expert or a partner to help you get there.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. There's room for improvement from the setup and scale perspective.

Compared to Cognos, Tableau and Power BI are pretty fast. 

The initial setup is very quick. Connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless compared to Cognos. Power BI eradicated dependency on a framework model. 

Power BI is cheaper than Tableau and Cognos.  Power BI Desktop comes free and the Pro license is $10 per month whereas Tableau desktop would cost you $70 per month. Cognos is mostly suited for large and medium size companies 

For someone who is new, I think that Power BI can be a little complicated. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Power BI a rating of seven. 

I'm using the desktop version and collaborating within our company.

As a training company we wish to analyze the instructions as they relate to our customers. Also, we take certain examples for our classrooms, our training.

I consider the solution to be quite good. In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results. It's more intuitive and it is better for understanding the whole process without much code. We're only using the user interface, not writing code.

We find it to be easier and it provides a better understanding of the results, both for us and our customers.

I cannot think of anything needing improvement at present and am quite satisfied with what we have, This said, I would like to see integration with Excel. This is because many of our customers like to have their results appear not only on a dashboard, but also in Excel, as they use it extensively. They would approve of the integration. 

Also, there should be greater functionality from Power BI for the performance of certain complex tasks. Many things are being done with the interface and if we'll want automation to play a role then we will need more flexible programming, such as we have with Data Expressions. The interface must be utilized for carrying out more complex tasks. We wish to automate this using software and programming language. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for one or two years. 

I feel the technical support to be fine. We have all the support that we need.

Having a proper understanding of how the data is modeled poses the greatest challenge. However, someone who has this should find the installation to be quite straightforward. The initial step involves having an understanding of the data model. 

I think the setup is quite easy and straightforward. The solution can simply be downloaded  and used. The most difficult thing involves the distillation of SQL Server, not what relates to Power BI.

From our side we have around 20 people who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance, although I include in this figure not only the technical but all of the administrative staff. We have the trainers and also the people who are working with the technical support to deliver the training.

The cost of the solution is more flexible for us because the desktop is free and we pay as we use it in the cloud.

The customers have licenses of their own. We use their installations to help them with their work. Usually, these people represent new entries into the company and we give them the initial experience to start working with the software.

As I could tell, I feel the solution to be easy. It is very good that all the users, as they use MS SQL, have a product from the same company. It is an overall experience for them to use Power BI.

We are an end-user and a partner to the vendor. We do training and provide consultations to our customers. 

We work with companies, around eight in total, and we deal with their employees. Overall, we are talking about approximately 300 people. We give training to the employees of these companies and also provide consultations. 

I strongly recommend the solution because I think it's a very modern tool and quite easy for all the data analysts and programmers.

I believe that all of the people who we have mentioned so far are quite satisfied with the solution.

I rate Microsoft BI as a nine out of ten. 

We have some monitoring data from turbines, and we want to plot the data to monitor the health state of turbines in different time stamps. I tried to download some data from the Postgres database and then do some plotting with that. I also tried to link different plots with each other to filter them and things like that.

I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data.

It's not really complicated, but I didn't find the things I was looking for. The ones I used to work with within Dash are more open, and there are more choices. But with Power BI, there are only limited types of plots that I can use.

For example, when I wanted to put the plots in Power BI, there was no extendable space. You have a limited page where you can place a maximum of three plots in that, and you can't do more than that on a single page. You have to create a new page, a different page for that. That made it a bit annoying, and the filtering part is limited, with basic functions. If you want to make custom filtering or custom functions, you can't do that.

Suppose you want to code a plot, Python available. You can code the plot you want, and you don't have to use a predefined one. But when you want to plot it and you want to import like five or ten packages in Python, there are limitations. It doesn't support all the libraries that Python has. Microsoft BI only supports a few, like three or four libraries at most. When I want to use my old code in Power BI, it doesn't handle it, and that was also annoying.

In the next release, it'll help if they added a coding area where you are more open to make custom things. Especially for a developer, it needs to be improved. For a Power BI person, it's fine, I think, because it doesn't require much technical knowledge, but a developer will need it. Maybe they should create a space for that.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the last three months. 

It's stable, but it's so slow. Sometimes it takes some time to respond, especially when you put two or three plots with big data. It becomes very slow.

I didn't contact technical support as I used the support on the internet. I'm satisfied with the documentation, but I didn't find what I was looking for.

I was using Dash Open Source, but when I discovered that it would take a lot of time, I wanted to define a platform for that. So, Power BI was the solution. Now I want to try Tableau, but I haven't had a chance to do that yet.

I used a two months free trial to see if it had what I needed. I can pay later for a full license, but I don't think I will do that.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a six.