Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Its primary use case is for CIPs from the purchasing department. It performs perfectly. It is very quick and easy to use.

We approve it for use with SAP BI, so it has been more effective for our users and much cheaper. So, the costs are small and the benefits are high.

Its connection to every database: Whatever and wherever it is. 

It is easy to work with and very chic.

The look is simple, and could be a little more professional.

The stability is very good. We have no problems.

We receive an update every month with new functions, so we are not missing anything.

The scalability is good. It works for a large community just fine.

We have not needed to use technical support. We are able to do everything by ourselves. That is one of the main reasons that we like the product.

We have SAP BI working. It has cost us more than a million Euro, and it does not work. This was one of the reasons to change.

Power BI is very easy to use and much sleeker. 

The initial setup was straightforward. 30 minutes, and it runs perfectly.

I would recommend Power BI as the best working solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Usability of the solution.

It's primarily for reporting, and the performance has been very good.

Other people can access data much more easily than before. Its usability is the main advantage, people in the company are using it.

It works mostly with Excel, and it's a very good price.

The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective.

The stability is very good now; it was definitely really poor a year ago.

Because it's cloud-based, it's very scalable.

I haven't used tech support specifically for Power BI but, in general, for Office and Office 365, it has been very responsive.

Before, we just had a whole bunch of spreadsheets lying around all over the place. So we really needed to get things tightened up but we weren't ready to invest in a database. But with Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are usability and support.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

The shortlist was, obviously, Tableau because they're in everyone's face and a couple of other smaller tools.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because it's very cost-effective, so it's very accessible in that respect, and a lot of folks do use spreadsheets so it helps ease the transition from using just spreadsheets to a more mature reporting environment.

My advice is, speak to your users because, at the end of the day, if they don't use it, you've failed, which was the case with other reporting tools.

Visualization and minor analytics. It has performed quite well thus far.

We've not used it enough to be able to speak to organizational improvements.

• Low cost - it's a free application
• Ease of use - excellent user interface

Perhaps the inclusion of ETL functionality would help.

Flawless. Absolutely flawless. The stability is excellent.

Integrates really well.

We did not have a previous solution. And we did not choose this solution. We actually inherited it. 

There was no real set up, just install the application. No complications whatsoever.

On our short list, for future consideration: Oracle.

Our most important criteria when selecting a vendor are cost, cost, and cost.

I rate Microsoft BI at seven out of 10 and that's because I have not utilized it as much as I would have liked to. However, it is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow.

Consider very carefully what your requirements are and plan your projects well. This is a wonderful tool but it will not get the work done for you.

We use it primarily to create visualizations, along with very light analytics of education performance data.

We cannot truly speak to improvements yet, as we are just exploring it. Potentially, it can provide instant access to a very current state of affairs for school performance.

• Dashboard functionality
• Ease of integration with various data sources

It is definitely a wonderful analytics tool. However, database ETL, data integration functionality would be absolutely perfect in many cases. Currently, it doesn't get the job done and we need to extract, transform, and load the data from faulty data sets into something more suitable for the deployment of the analytics tool.

No issues with the stability.

I can't speak about the scalability, but I can speak more towards the interoperability. There is a very rich capacity for sharing its functionality.

It is a very simple application so there was no real setup. Just download it.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• cost
• sustainability.

I would rate it at eight out of 10 because of its ease of use, simple setup, and excellent integration. I would rate it a 10 if they provided free training.

It's a wonderful application, it meets our needs.

We use it for visualization, to create presentations and dashboards. It works pretty well.

We are using Power BI because it is one of the best tools. It has been very good for all situations. The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae.

It is easy to work with. The tool is very complete.

The stability is good, no problem. We haven't had any trouble with it.

Our solutions are not for very many people, say 25 users. For them, it works very well. I don't know how it works with more users than that.

The customers we work with didn't have very elegant solutions. They were using traditional ERP and were getting default reports. Now, with programming code, it is fantastic. They are very happy with our solutions with Power BI.

Qlik Sense and QlikView are very good tools, very close to Power BI. Tableau is also a competitor but we haven't used it.

When selecting a vendor we look for expertise, a company that understands the problems and knows the market, solutions, tools; and one that creates successful products. That is the most important criterion. Also, when you are in front of your clients, you need to know who is supporting you from the back.

I would rate Power BI at eight out of 10 because it enables us to do all the things we want to do. Moving forward, for more than 5,000 users, or for very complex dashboards, we don't know how it works.

I always recommend Power BI. It's very good.

We are using this tool for different departments. Mainly, it's connected with the ERP to show our users information that comes from data in different areas. For example, we are using Power BI in production on quality and logistics. We have created the appropriate package of data that is connected with Power BI to show our end-users the graphics, the figures, the key indicators.

It has helped us to have the information in a visual format, using graphical tools. Until now, we had to view the information on paper or in Excel files. With this tool, we can view the company's and departments' situation graphically.

It also gives us the flexibility to interact with the data. For example, we can see information for one year, or one month, or a given project, or two projects. And it produces the information very quickly.

• Easy to use. 
• End-users can make changes to the graphics.
• The tool runs very fast.

I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment.

Also, I would prefer that the solution not be shared. I'm concerned that if we make a mistake we could reveal information to people who shouldn't see it. I would like to have my own on-prem server, to buy my own server and have my own infrastructure for Microsoft BI, with only with my data. Power BI, this global solution from Microsoft, is shared with multiple companies. I would like that the content that I create, my data, be available only for me, not shared with other companies.

It's very stable. I'm very satisfied with the tool.

For me, the scalability is sufficient.

I would rate technical support for this solution at nine out of 10.

As the IT manager in my company, I oversaw the resources and the setup of the solution but I was not involved on the technical side. But I think that it was really easy. It was not complex to set up.

My team did have to read a lot of technical documentation. We also contacted a company that knows this solution, one that has implemented it for other companies, consultancy-based.

Still, I have installed more complex tools in my company. This was one of the easier tools to put into production in my company in the last four or five years.

When selecting a vendor or product, the most important criterion for me is the usability - it must be easy to use. It must be one that end-users can learn to use on their own, so that the IT department does not have to make changes or solve problems for the end-users.

It's a good tool, easy to  use, Microsoft is adding more and more functionality.

My advice would be, always compare with other tools. In part this is own our internal rule, we must compare with others, to make sure we have the best tool.

I have started a consulting business. So my use case is typically what my clients are doing. I've used it for healthcare analysis, headcount analysis, financial and performance analysis.

One thing it's doing in the early stage of an implementation is, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected.

The ability for business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person.

One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes.

It's not only stable but it's constantly improving. 

The scaling is dependent on the data source itself, so it's not dependent on the solution. SQL Server, which is one of the strongest enterprise databases, makes that a good thing.

We were previously using Excel, and Excel did not have the ability to deploy nor did it have the ability to easily do some of the things that people were asking for. The switch was driven by being overwhelmed in the Excel world.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• the ability to develop solutions in an agile fashion
• the ability to have power users on the business side able to do their own work.

It's very, very easy to get started. The complexity is the typical complexity in deployment, in that you have to have people make decisions on who has rights to what data. As far as the implementation, it's quite easy.

Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper.

The short list was really only Tableau and Microsoft, and frequently clients have Microsoft products already installed so they have the security, the Active Directory, as well as the use of Excel, and the use of the collaboration tools like O365.

I'd say that Microsoft and Tableau are both nine and a half out of 10, and it's per the requirements I already mentioned. They both are very high-quality, easy to use, stable, they both allow business users to do a level of development, and they're both highly deployable.

My advice to a colleague would be that they actually do short trials with each of the products they're considering and the check the vendors' support.

Consolidating data from multiple sources and providing dashboards to a broad set of users: Finance, Human Resources, Operations, and Leadership.

It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves. We are getting adoption beyond original expectations.

Most importantly, the dashboards. Recently, we are exploring vendor provided analysis/visuals and the use of R.

Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today.