Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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.

We have integrated this solution into the software that we created for a client specifically for reports and data consumption. It is a hybrid infrastructure project with hybrid integration. It has a lot of reports executed or created from the cloud.

It has helped us to have a really quick view of the most important indicators of the operational issues of our platform. It has enabled collaboration between different operational levels in the company.

The use of graphics to show and view the data indicators is the most valuable feature. It is also very stable.

Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions.

It has good stability.

We haven't used it a lot, but it seems good so far. We have only three users. We may include two or three more users to the platform.

Their technical support is bad. I didn't like the technical support of Microsoft.

We also use Oracle and Tableau.

The initial setup was not complex, but we would like a more agile process. The initial deployment took about two months. The platform that we created was very robust.

We are a reseller of the solution. We did the deployment.

We were thinking of integrating Tableau instead of Microsoft BI, but the client chose Microsoft BI.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for integrating into our ERP so people can have a dashboard analysis of whatever is important to analyze or compare, whether it be top-selling products or sales performance, or quota analysis.

Just as a BI tool, there's not much difference between solutions. It works well with our product and it's something that customers are familiar with and they often already have a lot of licensing with Microsoft. It's an easy add-on to their users.

There's generally a sense of familiarity with the product.

It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools.

It's not even fair for me to respond on that as that's not my wheelhouse. I don't know how easy it is as I'm not doing any of the designs. Therefore, I have not had any real training on it. I don't think that's fair for me to criticize anything that they're doing.

The initial setup is a little bit technical and what an end user wants to see is always a moving target.

The solution needs better technical support.

I've been using the solution for about three years at this point.

In terms of stability, we haven't had any challenges with it at this point. As with multiple integrations across several companies we tend to make whatever change is best for the biggest base of clients. We haven't had any issues thus far.

Technical and end user support is something that might be lacking from Microsoft. As a user when I want to find an answer to, "Hey, how do I do this?" I often get better answers by going to a  website of a company that represents them than I do going directly to their site.  Maybe they do that on purpose to help drive business to those people, however, it would be helpful if it was more centralized and the quick and simple steps answers that I get elsewhere.

I have some past experience with solutions such as Tableau and Cognose but not integrated into this ERP product.  We chose one that we would feel would be on a common platform of our customers.

The setup is fairly straightforward but implementation is a little bit complex mostly due to how the customer driven scope changes often as they realize the power of a BI tool and want to be able to expand it's use.

We're on a Progress platform, so that's a little more technical on our side at the beginning of the original project.

The licensing costs vary. It all depends on the individual customer due to the fact that Microsoft's options are modular. For example, they have Microsoft Office suite, then they add CRM and then you might add BI.  It's not expensive per user, however, as you increase the functionality or add different tools, it becomes more expensive.

We qualify as a partner as we're a software distributor. We're using the most current version of the solution.

Here is the biggest thing: when you look at any BI tool or if it's the first time you're implementing one, you can easily get over enticed by the flashy display or the common things. However, it's the ability to drill down to your true business processes that are going to make it or break it as being the right tool or accesses the right information. Somebody that gets a BI tool for the first time will open a dashboard and say, "Oh, that's important for me to see every day." However, the reality is, when using a dashboard view you're looking for a red flag or highlights. The power of the BI tool is allowing you to drill down to the data behind the dashboard, that's where the real testing comes in.  Figuring out where to get the information from and how best to analyze it.  That's my best BI tool advice. Anybody can make a dashboard look pretty. It has to be useful too.

In general, I would rate the solution seven out of ten.

This solution is primarily used for business analytics. We generate reports so that the business analytics team can use them for their analysis.

Previously, we used Excel to perform the analysis. It was very tedious for them to get data into Excel, do the refresh, and generate the reports. Now, using Microsoft BI, they can connect directly with the data, it gets refreshed automatically, and they don't have to worry about refreshing it.

They get the data in the report section and they don't have to worry about report generation, data modeling, and other aspects.

The most valuable feature is the reporting. It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report.

This product enables self-service BI.

The paginated report functionality, which was intended to replace SPSS, is not yet up to the mark. We would like improvements made to the paginated reports so that it produces quality similarly to SSRS.

There is no automation for paginated reports, so then need to make it automated.

Ultimately, I would like to see all of the features from SSRS that are missing. That's ideally what I would like to have.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the past 10 years.

This product is pretty stable.

Scalability depends on the kind of reports and data we are looking at. It has multiple features for us based on the functionality and the requirement of the customer. It's not limited only to enterprise-specific customers. Rather,  It can be used by small, medium, as well as enterprise-based customers.

There is no limitation as such. So it's quite scalable.

I have work two different companies at this time, and as far as I know, there are between 1,500 and 2,000 people who use this product.

The quality of support depends on the Microsoft partner that you are working with. 

We have not faced any significant issues, but when we have, we raised a bug with the Microsoft technical team and they have resolved things accordingly.

This is the only tool that we are using for reporting. Previously, we used Crystal Reports.

We deployed this product ourselves. We used the documentation that is available at Microsoft.com.

The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user.

Our company focuses on Microsoft products, so we did not evaluate solutions by other vendors.

My advice is that if you are looking for an aggregated level of data, using it for reporting, then it's better to use Power BI because everything will be in memory and it will be much faster.

I would rate this solution a nine 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.

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.