Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The solution is stable.

It's a pretty scalable product.

Overall it's a good product. It is still rather new, therefore, for now, it's still a learning curve as we get used to all of the features and capabilities.

The charting tool could be improved.

The product could have better analytics capabilities.

The initial setup is not straightforward.

I've been using the solution for five months.

The solution is quite stable. I'd call it reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze and I can't recall bugs or glitches happening.

The solution is scalable. If your organization needs to expand it, it shouldn't be a problem to do so.

We have about five people on the solution, however, we don't have it fully functioning just yet.

I did not use a different solution previously before the implementation of this product. This is the first solution we've used for these purposes.

The initial setup is pretty complex. It's not straightforward or simple. You need to be a bit of an expert in order to handle it, and I am, unfortunately, not an expert. If you had more experience with it, you might find it easier than I did.

I was not involved in the pricing or procurement process of the solution. I'm not sure how licensing works of the overall cost of the solution on a monthly or yearly basis. It's not part of my day-to-day.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. It may be the latest.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight. We've been pretty happy with it, even though it is quite new to us.

We primarily use Power BI for data science solutions.

This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it. This is true even for business people who want to do a little bit of self-service. The whole thing has become quite simplified, as compared to what it was.

There are many good features in this product.

The most valuable features are a combination of the DAX and the inquiry capability, plus the visual gallery that we have. I think that these three things, or the combination of them, is the best that we have found.

I would like to have the capability to schedule exports in different versions. For example, if I want to schedule a subscription and attach an Excel file, we don't have this capability right now. A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement.

We have been working with Power BI for more than five years.

Overall, it is pretty stable. The cloud version is definitely very stable, and I have found very few flaws or areas for improvement. We have been using it for more than five years and we have every intention to continue with it.

It has been pretty nice for us, in terms of scalability. There hasn't really been a problem, as such. We have approximately 300 users.

Technical support from Microsoft gets a big thumbs up from me. They have blogs, a support page, and the community is very active. Most of the answers we need, we find them there. 

With this amount of information available, we don't need to use technical support extensively. When we do post something on the blog or in the community, the response that we get is pretty prompt.

The last time we utilized technical support was when we were investigating creating a subscription with an Excel file attached to it. We found out that it isn't yet possible with the current version.

The initial setup is straightforward, to say that least. It took just a few days to deploy.

The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool.

My advice for anybody who is considering this tool is that if you want to move to a self-service BI, this is probably the best tool available right now. The self-service is pretty good in terms of os user acceptance, usage, and simplicity. It is something that everybody wants and Power BI does really well in that area.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is that if the data is not according to what you want, that really isn't a problem. It has been a problem in the past, especially where the data is not in the form or the shape that you need, but with Power BI, that problem can be solved very easily.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution to analyze financial statements from our partners.

We build dashboards to see information on a product that is offered by one of our local telcos.

The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members. If you want to build a dashboard then you can publish it to the cloud, and then add people. This will give them access to the dashboard where they can review it, and modify it as well.

They have a mobile option that allows you to see the dashboard from your mobile phone, rather than having to look at your laptop.

I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited.

I would like to see an option for adding audio to the visualizations. 

They need to add support for putting emojis into the dashboards.

We have been using Power BI for the past two or three years.

In terms of stability, this product has never failed me. I have not experienced any bugs or glitches.

The scalability is good. They allow for multiple types of data sources, so if you grow your databases or you change your data sources, it's easy to add them to the tool visually.

We are a startup with four people, and everybody is using it. We are proposing it to our clients in cases where we are selling analytics because it's a good option for them.

I have not had a reason to speak with technical support, although I've looked at the community. They do have additional features that you can download from the site, as well. I have not a problem in terms of support.

I used Tableau in 2016, but I decided not to use it in this startup company because they don't have a free option. They do have a trial version, but that expires and I would have to then look for another solution.

With Microsoft BI, they have a free desktop version. 

I have also used Cognos BI before, although it was a bit complicated. This is another reason that I settled on Microsoft BI.

The installation is direct and quite easy to do. The instructions are available online and they are easy to follow.`

I completed the deployment myself.

We are using the free desktop version of this product.

Once the trial period for the BI service is over, the cost is approximately $10 USD per user, per month, so it's quite reasonable.

My advice for anybody interested in using Microsoft BI is to set up the desktop version. It's good to start off with, it's easy to learn, and they get the trial period for the BI service. Then, once they're done with the trial period, I think the licensing per month is quite affordable.

In summary, this is a good solution. It is not perfect, although if they added audio, emojis, and more types of graphs, then it would be.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. 

I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use.

A few features available in Tableau are not available in Power BI. For example. Tableau has the ability to make up the physical layer and all other stuff at runtime. In Power BI, we have to develop a proper physical layer to connect it.

The limitation that we normally face is related to the direct query mode. When it comes to the direct query mode, most of the functionality is not working, which is an issue for us. We have to use the direct query mode frequently because the client needs real-time data. They should work on this limitation.

There are a lot of other technical things that need to be improved. I am also following the Power BI platform and Microsoft Support Center platform on the web where users have put their requirements. Microsoft is also working on improving this solution. In every update, they add new features to this solution.

I have been using this solution for more than four years.

It is stable. I haven't found it hanging. It consumes a lot of memory on the local system but not while developing the reports. It also depends on the data on which we are working, but generally, it is light and stable.

My overall experience with Microsoft is actually quite good. We have contacted their technical support once or twice. It was something related to the Power BI visualization, where we needed to visualize some data, but they had some kind of limitation in personalization. We also wanted to connect Power BI with other servers, but we were facing some performance issues. The reports were not working fine. I don't think they managed to solve our issues.

I have worked on SiteSense and Oracle OBIEE. I feel more satisfied when I'm working with Power BI. It is more convenient as compared to other solutions.

The initial setup is easy. I didn't find any complexity in it. It can be difficult if the end users don't know how to use it. If they are trained on it, then after a week or a month, it gets easier for the end users. 

Its cost seems to be unreasonable if you have many users, but for a lesser number of users, it is reasonable. It is $10 per month. Clients easily accept this option, so they must think it is reasonable. 

It is quite cheap as compared to other tools, such as Tableau. One of the best things about this solution is that it has a trial version.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

It is mostly used for monthly cost reports for our department. We are also using it as a dashboard for giving some overview for management purposes. We are using the latest version.

Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable.

They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. 

They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use.

I have been using Microsoft BI for almost two and a half years.

Stability is quite good as long as you have proper sizing from the beginnings. If you do the right sizing keeping in mind the current usage as well as future growth, it is good.

It is scalable. We have around 65 seniors managers who use it on a weekly or monthly basis. Some reports are done weekly and some monthly.

I have not contacted them so far. I am from the user side. We contact our centralized IT department for any issues. If they have a technical issue that requires further escalation, they will directly contact Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is quite simple, but for the product use, you need to have people who have got experience of at least three to six months in using these applications. It took us two months to deploy across the company.

We have a core team that gets training from a Microsoft partner. We then deploy it ourselves. After six months of using this solution, some of the key users get advanced training. 

We also maintain it ourselves. We have around ten people for its maintenance.

It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear.

We reviewed some other intelligence tools, and we just used them for trials.

I would recommend this solution, especially for the companies that mostly use Microsoft products and ecosystem. I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

We have SharePoint in our company and then we just wanted to visualize that list and it connects to the Check Point list.

We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly.

If I have to update data automatically, where I have to pin the gateway, it doesn't update. There is a scheduled refresh functionality so that it refreshes automatically, but I find it very hard to make it work. Even though it's supposed to connect seamlessly, it's a bit complicated to make it refresh automatically.

My company has been using Microsoft BI for a few years but I've been using it since January 2020.

It's very stable.

I think it's very scalable. I don't even foresee that as a challenge. 

We have five or six users who view the reports. There are other departments who might be using it as well but we have five or six in my department. It's expected to rise to 15, 20.

The users are managers who want to look at some of the resources.

I haven't interacted with Power BI before. If I get stuck at someplace, I just go online and I search in the forums and I find my way.

There isn't really a setup involved. It's just download Power BI desktop and publish it.

We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate.

Ensure that you use Sharepoint. If you are within the Microsoft system and want to have a similar experience to Microsoft Teams, then Microsoft Power BI is a very good solution for that.

I would like to have the ability to run the scheduled refresh for R and Python on the server. Right now, it's not possible.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Our primary use case is to learn what Power BI can do. We also use it to create dashboards and to see what is available for people to use. We see how it integrates with Excel. You can easily get the data into a visualization but also still have access to the underlying data.  

We use it see how we can move away from an Excel spreadsheet but still give the users the correct answers to the questions that they have. I want to move away looking and fixing issues on particular lines and be able to easily answer the questions with visualizations so users can answer the questions a lot quicker and adapt to changes easier.  

I was self-learning it, we don't use it in our organization. We are looking to use it though in the future. We use a different tool and want to see if we can get more questions answered with Power BI. It's linked to Office 365 and Azure, so it would help us to answer some difficult questions and help identify issues/problems so we can find solutions and adapt the model a lot quicker. Going through over 100,000 lines of data takes too long and we need to be able to group the data more to be able to identify what works better, so a pie chart or map will help to identify issues that are not working. 

The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on. But I need a way to work on getting the data showing correctly and be able to drill down into a worksheet like Excel, as people like to know what the top-level information means. It's important to be open and show them what they want. The number of visualizations is great. So many different options to choose from like heat maps to pie charts.

I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports. We want to condense some reports, so they work for all departments, and not have a version for every single department. Also, I would like to have formulas easier to complete and create. Having its own system means something new to learn, although saying that, it's not hard to pick up this information. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for six months.  

Microstrategy, and no, we have not swapped yet. I use both to keep on top of my own skill set. 

It depends on what you are wanting to do. Get the cost of users, and the servers, and work out if you are hosting, or if it's going into the cloud. 

We didn't as it's a company decision to look to change the BI system. 

We use Microsoft Power BI to budget for all departments and to compare the balance of the past month.

The accounting data needs improvement. 

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for a year. 

It is a stable solution. 

Ten users are using the solution. 

The initial setup is complex. 

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