Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We primarily use the solution for building dashboards, one-off analytics, and things of that nature that combine data.

The functions from a standpoint of generating analytics have been really helpful overall. That aspect has helped improve our organization.

In general, we are pretty pleased.

The ability to combine the data and to connect with pretty established platforms has been the solution's most valuable aspect to us. 

The fact that you can visualize items is great. The visualization power is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I don't know if I can pinpoint any specific items that I don't like. However, the more connectors that they provide the better. 

I don't use it day in, day out to tell you if it has any kind of functionality items that may be open up for improvement opportunities. 

The solution could probably beef up items related to statistics and things to cover the gap between the advanced things that you can do with Tableau. Any kind of advanced statistical analysis would be very helpful in future releases.  

The solution could be quicker at rendering data.

I've been using the solution for three years or so.

The solution is very stable. It's reliable. We've been happy with it. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale well if you need it to. That shouldn't be a problem for any organization.

I'm not sure how many people are actually using the solution in our organization. Everybody has been kind of encouraged to leverage the platform on an ongoing basis. However, obviously, those that are holding jobs related to any kind of analytics are probably more prone to using it.

I don't tend to deal with technical support. That's probably more on the IT team than on my plate and therefore I don't really know how their tech support works. I can't speak to their knowledgeability and response times.

With our company, there were probably those that needed to do advanced analytics that were using solutions like Tableau or Excel.

The initial setup is not complex. It's pretty straightforward. A company shouldn't run into any problems when it comes to setting it up.

We have a pretty strong partnership with Microsoft and we tend to help them develop their product as well.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time.

I would advise other organizations that the product has a lot to offer and therefore it's worth the investment and the effort.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. Sometimes it could be quite at rendering data, however, overall, we've been happy with the results.

We use it mainly for Qlik Sense. We're using business interests analytics. Everyone from marketing to sales uses it. Microsoft BI is usually used for oversight.

Microsoft BI is easy and but not very user-friendly. But you can directly connect it to an Excel file. You can find out how many sites to look at and do it yourself directly. The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible. 

The dashboard could be simplified. The service is currently good, but it could be better. If you compare it to Tableau and Qlik Sense, they are doing much better work. The ability of their dashboards is much better. The technical part is easy in Qlik Sense, where we can do some coding. It isn't easy in Power-BI.

Microsoft BI can be more user-friendly. Scalability is also a challenge for us because it's difficult to handle Power BI's dashboard.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the last four years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution. We haven't had any issues yet.

It's not very scalable because it's difficult to manage the Microsoft BI dashboard.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is very easy.

Their price is good.

I would recommend this product to potential users. But if they have options, I would recommend one of the others.

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

I lead the data visualization competency. As a competency leader, my responsibility is to make people grow in this technology. It could be Power BI, Tableau, or QlikView. We are service-oriented, and depending upon the demand, we have to have experienced people and a resource pool ready in these areas. Depending upon the requirement, I decide how many people need to be trained or hired.

Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python. 

It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it.

I have been using this solution for close to two years.

We found no issues. It is an aggregated reporting tool. It cannot handle a detailed level of data. It is meant only for the dashboarding purpose. You need to have your underlying data in an aggregated way, and then it would be faster. It depends on whether you have a live connection or you don't have a live connection.

We don't see many issues, but whenever we put a request, they at least respond.

I have worked on Tableau. Before Tableau, I have worked with traditional tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects. My team has got experience with Spotfire, but we are not seeing a great demand for Spotfire.

If you ask me for the top three, I would qualify Power BI, then Tableau, and then QlikView. That's the demand that I'm seeing in the market from various customers.

I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView.

My first advice is to learn SQL. The foundational knowledge and SQL skills are the most important. You have to be very strong in writing SQL code. You have to improve your mind so that you know what you are writing in Power BI. After that, it is very easy to pick up any front-end reporting tool, such as Power BI or Tableau. After you have good expertise in Power BI, you can slowly learn Python so that you can do good integration. All these efforts would be great for your career.

Being a gold partner of Microsoft for the past few years, we work directly with Microsoft product teams. Sometimes as part of a pre-launch, they also connect with us. If we see a feature or functionality that a client requires, we at least put it across to them. How they prioritize it within their product team is up to them. They prioritize depending on the need of the market and demand from various clients, and they release features accordingly. Sometimes, we also work on a pre-release.

They release new features and functionalities every month. They have also recently released data protection smart narratives. If you look at the Gartner report, they are leading. I see a lot of demand for this solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

I use Microsoft Power BI for analytics. It is an online service for business intelligence. I use it to analyze every piece of data that I have. My key performance indicators are on Power BI. My sales indicators, such as number of clients, number of sales and region, type of client, type of solution, due to date comparison, and due to year comparison, are really based on the sales of the company. I am using Power BI Pro.

Constant collaboration is the most valuable. I can build a dashboard, and several co-workers can access this dashboard. We can share information that is important for decision-making.

It is a very easy-to-deploy solution. It is compatible with a lot of data sources. It is also very stable and scalable. There is also a very good forum and a lot of help and online training.

I would like them to provide a license that just allows us to see dashboards. What I don't like about this solution is that in order to just watch a dashboard, you need a license. Currently, you need to purchase a full license of Power BI Pro just to see something, which is not attractive. If you have a license, you can see a shared dashboard, but you can also build a dashboard or you can collaborate with other people. However, if you only want to see a dashboard, there is no license for that. I only want to see the dashboard, and I don't want to do anything more than watching the information on the dashboard. There is no license that allows you to see a shared dashboard. This is one of the areas of opportunity because I would like a lot of people to be able to see a shared dashboard, not to interact with it or to collaborate online with it. 

I would like to see more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources. Given the fact that everything is related to Microsoft Azure and all services available on Microsoft Azure, I see that they're building more connections to Microsoft Azure services instead of other non-Microsoft services. I understand the strategy, but it would be good to have more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources.

It is a very robust and stable solution. We are a company that works with enterprise solutions from SAP and Microsoft. We have worked with companies that have 5,000 users and without a problem. So, it is very robust and stable.

Being a cloud solution, it is very scalable. You can easily scale it based on the usage. If you're using it, you pay for it, and if you're not using it, you stop paying for it.

In our company, Power BI being used by maybe 15 people out of 70. It is a growing solution. Three years ago, we had only five people who were working with Power BI. Now, we are building more and more dashboards for our service desk area, and its usage is growing.

I haven't contacted them. We report everything to our own Service Desk, and they are the ones who scale the problem to the manufacturer. This means that every time that we have important issues, they have to be solved in a very decent period of time by the manufacturer. There is a very good response time, and every time we had problems, they were solved. We didn't have anything pending.

Given the fact that it is on the cloud, it is really easy to deploy. It is only about connecting the engine to your data source and start building the dashboards. You can just connect your data. It doesn't matter if it is on-premises or as a service. You can just connect it.

It is based on the usage. If you're using it, you pay for it, and if you're not using it, you stop paying for it.

If your data source is a Microsoft-based data source, this is the best choice. If you have a data source that is not Microsoft-based and is on a non-Microsoft platform, such as MongoDB or Unix, you should see some solutions like MicroStrategy or Qlik. If you have a pure 100% Microsoft-based data source, Microsoft Power BI is the answer. You can do wonders with Microsoft Power BI. It is a very cool solution.

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

We are an analytics company, and we consult for different companies. Currently, we were doing automation of financial reporting, income statements, balance sheets, cash flow, and different kinds of analysis on revenue and products. We extract data from ERP solutions, accounting data, and then we transform that into financial reports.

The data modelling and the use of decks are key features. It is difficult to create financial statements using most BI solutions, with decks it is a bit easier to summarize data and to have cascading totals that you would find in an income statement or balance sheet. Most other solutions, you can not have a moving total but with this solution, we found it very easy to implement. 

I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated. 

I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients. We should have a visual for income statements and other elements, this should be made easier. For example, suppose you are looking at an inventory report, it is all plug and play because you can just use a matrix or a table to summarize the information and the visuals. The systems are more adapted to that kind of area than for financial purposes.

For the next release, I think they need to improve on getting more visuals that are related to the finance side of things. Like I mentioned before, the matrix now is more of an OLAP cube, we are looking into something more adapted to the finance field, such as a drag and drop where you can build an income statement very quickly without too much code. This would be a nice addition. 

As far as I understand Microsoft has two solutions that are similar, Power BI Report Builder and Power BI Desktop. The features that you get in Power BI Desktop are more advanced than the features that you get in Power BI Report Builder. They should just merge the two and move forward this way. There is no reason to have two different applications serving the same purpose.

I have been using the solution for 18 months.

The biggest problem we have had is refreshing with MySQL, we are using a MySQL backend. It has to refresh all the data at once and store it in a cache, is my understanding. I am not sure where Power BI stores the data that it gets from the warehouse, this takes some time. If there are interruptions in the network, then the figures become messed up at some point. It should either commit all the data or it should not commit anything at all if there are errors. I think that is the biggest issue we have had so far.

We are rolling out the solution to various clients and one of them is a large client in the manufacturing industry. The solution scalability is very good, we can do a lot with it.

We have about 40 users at the moment. As we continue to expand, we are looking at approximately 20 companies with about five users at a time. Currently, we have done five companies, but I think by the end of this quarter, we should have about 100 users in total. At the end of the year, we hope to have at least 200 users from different financial departments in different companies. It is my team that does the financial reporting, we also have other companies that have the operations and logistics. We are looking to probably double that figure because eventually, we should be moving to the enterprise license. We had seen that the enterprise license will be beneficial to us. If everything goes as planned, we are looking at about 500 users at some point.

At the moment we have not needed much technical support from Microsoft. Most of the problems we have faced have either been resolved by someone else on the forums available. We also have an expert consultant in the UK who helps us. The areas that have needed assistance has been very minimal.

We have used Eclipse BIRT and Knowage in the past but were not as good and more complicated. We find Power BI is more direct, it is much easier to connect to other data sources and so forth.

The setup was very straightforward. You just download through the Windows Store or through the website, then you just start to connect your databases.

The first deployment took approximately four months. The data preparation took most of the time, once we got into Power BI we had most of our financial reports in a month.

Part of our implementation strategy was to get the requirements from the customer, documents, information on what they were using before, key performance indicators and other information. Afterwards, we started to build the data warehouse with the requirements in mind. We tried to mimic the reports that they were using before when we were building the Power BI reports. We tried as much as possible to have reports that look similar to the reports to meet our customer's needs.

There is a similarity between Microsoft Excel and Power BI. If you understand one it make the other easier to understand. If you grasp Excel, it is easy to grasp Power BI as a user. We wanted to make it as similar as possible to the Microsoft Excel experience, with the drill-downs and the pivot tables and so forth. I think with the matrix in Power BI, it is more or less similar, it is the same experience. To summarize our implementation strategy, it was to try to mimic the reports as much as possible and then add more features that are available in Power BI.

We pay on a monthly basis which is approximately $10 per user on the Microsoft Power BI Pro license. At the moment we are still down at 400 users, but once we reach 500 users, we will move to the premium edition. The premium is $5,000 for unlimited users. Currently, with the 40 users, the cost is roughly $500. 

There can be some additional cost, for instance, it was an internal decision to have an on-premises gateway set up with the standard Windows Server installed on it. We had to set up this server on our side, which costs us no more than $400. This was important because we needed something to allow our reports to refresh on a regular interval without people using the personal gateways.

I would advise those thinking about implementing the solution to compare different products to see what is on the market. They have to look at the pricing which is what we looked at initially, I think it quite affordable. Additionally, research the infrastructure that is required and the cost per user for the different BI solutions. Some of the solutions are cheap, such as Eclipse BIRT and Knowage, but it takes a lot of efforts to get your reports out with them.

With this solution, it is more of a drag and drop scenario. You have a quicker delivery time as compared to the traditional or the older BI solutions.

The biggest lesson I have learned with working with this solution has been in the area of data warehousing, you should develop something that is more like a star schema when building a BI solution, especially with this solution. It makes things much easier. We did not favour the star schema, we preferred the snowflake approach. However, data modelling is easier when you use the star schema.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

All our operational dashboards are on Microsoft BI. Visualization is primarily what we use Microsoft Power BI for today. 

We're in a position to explore all the underlying data. For example, your SLAs, how they're trending month on month, or how your backlog of tickets is going.

We look at all the respondent resolution SLAs or different priorities every month. If there's a dip somewhere, we're able to double click and then go to the actual client or the ticket, which has caused a problem.

You can go back and see if you need to do anything to recover from that situation. For example, if your SLA brings 25% and if you're dipping to 94%, go back and see why you're dipping. If there are, let's say, too many incidences from a specific technology or a specific client, go back and see what you need to do to fix those things.

We're now looking to get to the next level with exploratory analytics. We want to go into what we call explanatory analytics, which analyzes the underlying data. Instead of waiting for something to fail, you come out and say, "Hey, these are some areas that are not working well, and you probably need to look at it."

We're trying to use Microsoft BI and for what we call actionable insights. This tool should be able to build up and show you what the underlying data is telling you. For example, our affiliates may be trending at 95%, but since we run a shared service, there could be some clients where it's 100% and some clients where it's probably 85%. Those claims could lead to a client-side problem or a client satisfaction issue.

Explanatory analytics can give you such exceptions automatically. Then you can go back and work on those clients to ensure that you pull your SLA back up from 85% to 95% and ensure that customer satisfaction doesn't dip.

I think the visualization part is valuable. It's also very easy to build new dashboards. It's fairly intuitive for people who understand the Microsoft Power BI tool.

We're fairly happy with the product in terms of both configuring the Microsoft BI dashboards and making changes to them. It's fairly easy to make changes.

Actionable insights could be better. I would like it to provide exceptional reports that you need to act upon to keep your operations or businesses going. That's something I would like to see. 

On the origination side, if there are better graphs and maps to visualize data like I've seen other tools like Tableau do, it might be useful. They need to have very different ways of presenting information. If it's eye-catching, better than a pie chart or a bar graph, that's even better.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for about a year.

Microsoft BI is stable. We aren't faced with too much downtime. On a scale of five, I would probably rate it at 4.8 out of five throughout any given week.

I think we have scaled up Microsoft BI fairly easily because it's on a cloud. We've added users. We added more dashboards from our different service lines, and we found it fairly easy to scale up.

The initial setup is fairly easy and straightforward.

I would definitely recommend Power BI from a visualization perspective. It's quick and easy to set up and scales up very well. If you've been using data on Excel sheets and converting them to graphs on PowerPoint, I think this is a tool that gives you almost a live visualization of what your operations are. 

We use it for our day-to-day IT operations. I'm sure it can also be used to visualize other data like how many clients, how clients build up weekly, and the various stages of transitioning client needs into services. These things can be very easily developed on our Microsoft BI dashboard.

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

We use Power BI to manage all business indicators. Our customers' files, operations, number of transactions, satisfaction levels, history. We have a very powerful dashboard we use in Power BI and all our customers use it. I use it to drill down data from customers, to make decisions regarding business and other things. We are Microsoft partners and I'm a board member of our company.  

Power BI has a unique set of APIs to connect different databases on different systems. It means that I can extract data from a variety of sources and systems. It's very flexible. I work with numerous systems. We have new systems, super fast systems, and I have very old systems that run very well. They don't need updating because they run so well. Power BI has the power to connect with different sources, and I have a data scientist that orchestrates all that data because it's also about understanding the data, the application of intelligence and strategy on the data, and exposing it on the dashboard. 

I think that they should improve the mobile application that they have, it's very poor. We generally have a very huge area to cover, to move blocks and data. But sometimes I need a small set of data that I can see in my personal iPhone. But the iPhone solution, and the solution from any smartphone, tablet, etc., is so limited. It's particularly important now when so many people are working from home. Sometimes I need to reply to a call from my support or customer teams, they might be asking for a concession for a customer. I want to be able to look at the data on that customer. I take out my phone and I have no data. It's the worst. I think that if they improve the mobile solutions, it would help me and my team. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability of the product is very good. Microsoft solutions are very reliable. They're very mature and deliver reliable solutions. 

The scalability is good and powerful. Everyone in the company uses Microsoft tools, predictive tools. Microsoft 365, Power BI, SharePoint, Teams, Word, PowerPoint.

Technical support is a challenge, it's a complex question. Microsoft has different levels of support, it's all very customized. Different kinds and sizes of companies require different levels of support. The support is strong but it comes at a price. It's their business model. I can buy a number of hours from a specialist and get a real-time response.

The initial setup is quite complex and not easy to manage. You need a data scientist. It's not only connected to a data source, it's not only connected to an Excel sheet. For basic use that's okay but for corporate use to extract major features from the solution, you need a data scientist. It's expensive but a necessity and it's a very good investment for companies, because the data scientist enables the company to make better decisions and to help improve customer satisfaction.

It's very important to have a very good data scientist, without that it's very difficult. It's a key requirement. I'm only unhappy with the Windows software. I'm a Mac user for over 20 years, and, in comparison, Windows is bad. For us, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM are not affordable. They're interested in larger companies. In the last few years, Microsoft seems to be happier to go for the smaller companies too.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We use Microsoft BI on our portfolio management platform. We use live dashboards, in the public cloud.

We only use it for export and import, but that suits our purpose, along with the dashboards.

The upgrade process could be improved. Sometimes we miss information if we haven't kept up with the versions. It should be easy to migrate, but it does not provide enough information about what may be lost if you upgrade, especially if something goes wrong with the upgrade. Any current developments should be included in the upgrade so that it is a seamless process.

We have been using Microsoft BI for about 4 years. We use the latest version, and we have 4 users.

Very good. We don't have any issue regarding the stability of the solution.

The scalability is good.

You can find everything on their website. We rarely need to contact Microsoft directly, so I would rate Microsoft support for Microsoft BI as excellent.

Our setup is very straight forward and can be done in a matter of hours.

You have to know what you want to accomplish, meaning that you have to know why you are using the solution, what kind of information you want to show in that solution and the location of the data. I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.