Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I developed a product based on Power BI. I intensely use it. 

I also use it to generate reports and monthly management reports. It's connected to the production database with connectors. It's not so big data, but it's for medium-sized datasets.

It's easy to develop custom solutions. The DAX scripting solution of Power BI is easy to use and covers a lot of needs. 

It's user-friendly. It also has the capacity to connect to a variety of data sources without any other solution – especially within the Microsoft environment- which is very easy.

For us, it's difficult to manage business data and visualize and model it without Power BI or a similar tool. Although, I am more comfortable using Power BI than any other tool. Data modeling is one of the most important features of Power BI because you can model almost anything. For me, it is very helpful. 

I haven't personally faced challenges with Power BI, but it might be challenging when it comes to big data usage. I haven't had a real challenge yet - maybe it could become challenging due to a lack of information or skills to use Power BI at a more advanced level.

So, the product could be complex for inexperienced users. It's very complex and you need to keep up with the updates. Otherwise, you can miss a lot of nice features that can be useful in your daily work.

I'm looking for something that can make it much easier to incorporate Power BI visuals or dashboards into, let's say, Power Apps – custom Power Apps or anything like that. 

The most important thing would be to seamlessly embed reports in applications. For example, to have buttons that can be navigated through multiple solutions – from Power Apps to Power BI to SharePoint – via links or something like that. 

If this transition is more natural (so users don't notice they're moving between solutions), it will be very helpful in developing complex solutions without sophisticated workarounds or lots of code. 

Staying within the low-code area, there's a lot of potential for interesting things. This is my main focus – developing low-code solutions that integrate with Power BI.

I work with Microsoft's entire suite of products. 

I have been using Power BI for more than five years. 

I haven't had major issues because my usage is at a medium level, not a high level. I haven't personally interacted with Microsoft support. But, there seems to be a lot of information and people using this solution, and it's easy to escalate problems within your company. You can learn a lot of things quickly using resources like ChatGPT or Microsoft's own solutions, which are very helpful within the Microsoft ecosystem.

I used MicroStrategy. It's very nice, and similar, but a bit more difficult to connect to other systems. You need more technical skills. With Power BI, those connections are easier. I am not obliged to learn a lot of technical aspects.

For me, Power BI is a very good option. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, working with people who use Microsoft solutions, Power BI makes sense. It might be a bit more difficult if you're in a different ecosystem – companies tend to promote their own technologies for upsells and cross-sells. It's a sales thing.

Price is the best feature of Power BI! You get a lot of value for the price. If you know how to use it, it's a great BI solution for your money. 

A complete solution license is no more than fifty euros per month – that's not expensive at all. Even thirty euros per month is enough to have Power BI, Power Apps, SharePoint solutions, and things like that. Very, very cheap.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend using this solution. Power BI offers very good value for money. You do need some skills, but not necessarily deep technical ones. 

It's more important to understand the business context and how to design effective reports in order to put Power BI and connected solutions from the Power Platform to best use. 

My view is that we often overemphasize the technology and miss the true asset: the value that Power BI and the others bring to the business.

Microsoft BI's initial setup is very straightforward.

The solution's documentation needs improvement. It is always a challenge to connect any data that Microsoft needs to read. I'm not able to find out. The solution's visuals and themes are really poor and should be improved.

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

The performance of Microsoft BI is very poor because whenever the reports are published, data never comes in the first place when the site is open. It takes a long time to load, and the access level restriction is not as easy as it is in Tableau.

More than 5,000 people are using Microsoft BI in our organization.

I previously used the Tableau solution.

Microsoft BI's deployment takes hardly 10 to 15 minutes or less than that. I had to just download and install the solution, as it was a desktop version.

Overall, I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.

Currently, it is used in our financial reporting and financial consideration reports.

It is stable.

It has good functionality and is fully integrated with Microsoft products. If you have already a direct connection or direct integration with Microsoft products, it is very good actually. In some cases, we just developed our BI dashboard and sent it to PowerPoint, for example. It'll be published as the power BI format, which is very good as a feature, to have that capability to just easily populate everything in PowerPoint.

Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially.

It's pretty user-friendly.

The product can scale.

Our main concern with Power BI is it doesn't have a connection with the finance application. Power BI is used to present some financial data. However, if there is no direct connection or a ready API to be connected either to Oracle ERP or SAP or a different ERP, it won't be very useful. We need more integration capabilities. 

We've been using the solution for five years. 

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

The scalability has been great. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

In my organization, there are about 10 to 20 users. The majority have shifted to Qlick.

I haven't contacted technical support in the past. The product has been so stable we haven't needed assistance. 

We have multiple BI tools. We previously worked with Oracle BI. Our expectations were not met, and therefore we moved over to Microsoft BI.

In my sector, currently, we are using Qlik Sense. We started using it one year ago.

We are shifting from Microsoft to Qlik due to the fact that we have Oracle ERP as a back end. We are trying to find a technology or BI, which already has a direct connection with this ERP. We went into Qlik Sense for that reason.

The initial setup is straightforward, actually. It is like any other Microsoft product. All of Microsoft's products are straightforward. It isn't complicated. This is one of the main benefits.

I'm not sure how long the deployment process was. I can't speak to how big the technical team was that handled the rollout.

We pay an annual licensing fee. 

I would recommend the solution if they already have a Microsoft ERP system. If they have already Microsoft and they have already their financial system in place and if they don't have data movement, Power BI will be very powerful. If a company has different financial systems, they have to track all these data points first, build the business model and then import it to Power BI. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My primary use case of Power BI is to generate dashboards and reports based on past data. Especially for people who aren't engineers, like purely business people, Power BI is helpful because it allows them to analyze and assess their complete business solutions end to end. Power BI provides insights that can help company growth, in terms of revenue and ROI. This solution is cloud-based. 

The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with. 

This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low. 

Other than that, their licensing costs could be lowered. Microsoft handles everything. For example, if I want to publish a report order from Powerpay, Microsoft doesn't allow me to do this. It's a complete business, but the licensing is very costly. I don't think Microsoft will change their pricing system, though. 

I have been using Power BI for the past five years. 

Power BI can handle a maximum of one to four gigabytes of data, but the performance becomes very slow if you handle big data. Since this solution is cloud-based, it's always updated to the latest version. 

The development is very easy because it depends on each computer. Power BI is a desktop solution that you install on your computer. Once I complete my development, I publish through the internet, which the external users are using. The number of users doesn't matter. 

There is a Power BI community, which I'm very happy about. They're there for anything and they're very helpful. In the past, Microsoft has helped us with infrastructure problems. 

In the past, I worked with other Python data visualization tools like Dash and Panel. Compared to those tools, Power BI is very easy.  

The installation is very straightforward. I did it myself and it took barely ten minutes. 

I implemented this solution myself. 

You don't need a license for the development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them. 

Another visualization tool I've heard of is Splunk, which helps to handle and visualize huge amounts of data. In the future, if Power BI is unable to handle this sort of streaming data, I may consider switching to Splunk. When I extract huge amounts of data with Denodo, Power BI becomes very slow—for example, it takes more time for the display to load. Right now, Power BI can handle a maximum of around one to four gigabytes, whereas Splunk can handle very large amounts of data. 

I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution because it's the best visualization tool I have ever worked with, but the licensing is costly. 

We use Microsoft BI all over our enterprise but our main use is for the organizational dashboard. My organization sends all of our systems and ERP data into a Power BI dashboard, which goes to all the managers, the leadership, and then gets reported up to the company executives.

Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.

My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations.

Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop.

In terms of the performance, it could always improve sometimes. It's only slow to update. The automated data feeds have to be all updated.

I have been using Microsoft BI for two years.

The stability of Microsoft BI is very good. We have not had an issue.

Microsoft BI has scaled very well for us. We have a very large organization with users all across the company.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution. It's a standard program for analysts and even managers will use it. It is a standard business analyst software. 

The solution is extensively being used in our organization.

I have not contacted Mircosoft for technical support. I only use our internal support.

We previously used SAS and it is similar to Microsoft BI. It's a little different in the visualization. It was more on analytics, but it also had the visualization.

We had SAS Enterprise Guide which was on-premise. When they were looking at cloud solutions, they kind of opened it up for more possibilities. The deciding factors of why we switched to Microsoft BI was we already had many Microsoft products and we have a SQL Server Data Warehouse. There's good integration between our existing Microsoft systems with Microsoft BI.

I was part of the initial user testing of Microsoft BI, but it was mostly IT that handled all the initial implementation.

We have a dedicated IT team of two administrators that support Microsoft BI. One of the administrator's full-time job is to manage the Microsoft BI.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do some training. There is enough training curriculum available to get people going.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

The data is captured by transaction processing systems, and even when the data is captured by a very sophisticated enterprise resource planning system, or ERP system, such as SAP. We'll find that that data is organized in a manner that is suited for the data updated. Therefore, when data has to be used for decision making, it has to be reoriented and organized in a manner that is suitable for data analysis and further for predictive analytics also. What we do is pull out data from multiple data sources, either on SAP or somewhere else.

There could be a certain budget or plan or target-related data on some other platform or on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The data is stored at different places. Some data could be on your internet platforms. Wherever it is, we pull out the data. Then we get that into the SQL server and we organize it in a manner that's suitable for further creation of dashboards and analytics applications, which can be used for better decision making.

The company has been able to make better decisions, due to the fact that, when we prepare business intelligence or data analytics applications, they are used by very similar decision-makers, as well as middle-level management decision-makers. From the same infrastructure, the data is used by even the report consumers. You can consider three layers of users, report consumers, mid-level use, as in, those who do interactive analysis of data, and decision-makers. Right at the top, those who would like to see the key performance indicators and use them for deciding a course of action can do so. All of our applications have been providing functionality for all these types of needs, including risk and compliance.

The solution offers many features, however, just the way in which that product is designed is quite useful for us. 

The way in which it can connect to multiple data sources is also very useful. The way in which data can be manipulated by using data analysis expressions has also been a good feature for us.

The solution is stable.

The solution is quite scalable. 

Our clients seem to be happy with the level of technical support they receive.

With our experience, the initial setup is straightforward.

Microsoft is often updating the solution adding new helpful features.

I'm not a product expert as such, however, I am aware that Microsoft comes out with a newer version, which is really downloadable and it's replaced every month. Therefore, the improvement is continuous. Since Microsoft provides a free downloadable desktop version of our BI. That desktop portion gets a new version which comes every month, we can replace the older version. 

Their ecosystem is quite good in terms of adding new features, in terms of adding custom visuals or adding many more interfaces or reporting features and more functionality within existing reporting and graphs. We don't have much to complain about except that they can always add many more features as they go.

Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution.

We've used the solution since its inception. We've used it for a very long time. We have been in this domain for the past 30 years.

The solution is quite stable. That's why it is right at the top, of Gartner's quadrant. We have deployed it with hundreds of users and it's withstood the test of time.

The solution is quite scalable. Of course, it requires data strategy just like any solution or any tool.

We tend to have 100 to 200 users at a minimum using the solution.

The solution is extensively deployed. We have plans to use it on an ongoing basis. They come out with new versions and new features every month, and this constant updating and iteration of the product have really been very helpful for us to provide more advanced solutions.

In terms of technical support, we don't really deal with it. Normally, our clients have a contract with Microsoft, however, my understanding is that their experience is good. 

We were using a CA tool and we have done work on Oracle. We have done work on many such platforms. However, since 2008 or 2009, we have been focusing on Microsoft as the total cost of ownership has been quite reasonable.

The initial setup is quite straightforward.

Our implementation strategy involved a business requirement phase where we sought out to understand exactly the expectations for a particular project. Then there is was a design phase where we decided on a data strategy of pulling data from multiple data switches. After that, there was a dashboard design phase, which includes wireframing of dashboards and then designing the dashboards according to those wireframes. Finally, we deploy and in that phase, we put in role level security, et cetera, and deploy it at an enterprise level. The entire process tasks three to four months in total, end-to-end.

We don't require much maintenance due to our maturity in design and development. We have been monitoring sites without having to add too many resources at our end as we have a robust design and maybe one person can handle four to five.

We do the implementation on our own. We have deep experience in this area, and we have developed two types of processes that we use to deploy our solutions. One is the data approach, where you know all best practices and methodologies are embedded into that thing. That framework gives a hundred percent assurance in terms of the success of that project. We have also developed a presentation layer framework whereby different subject areas are designed with very indicative dashboards and those dashboards can be quickly adapted to any data. That way, rather than starting from scratch, we use this framework which helps us to deploy our solution quite successfully. It's very fast also. We save around 50% to 55% of the time this way.

We don't deal directly with licensing. That said, certainly, we are aware in terms of what the Microsoft BI license costs. If it has to be applied on the cloud, then it costs around $10 per month per user. For a pro license and for a premium license it's around $20 per month per user. If it has to be applied on-premises then, depending on the course of your server, you have to buy a software assurance version of the database.

They don't charge for additional features. If you want a premium capacity to handle your work or job, then there is a separate license available. That is a premium license, which is available with the entire product managed by Microsoft and you can use lot more features, including Azure, et cetera.

We are Microsoft partners.

We have two deployment options. Some of our clients have deployed the cloud solution. Some are deployed on-premises.

Anybody who has worked on existing spreadsheet-based solutions can quickly adapt to Microsoft BI and the data visualization and interactive data features, they'll find it very exciting to use and very fast to adapt to it. It's a very effective solution.

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

We are using this solution for analytic dashboards.

The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well. 

When it comes to security Microsoft BI can integrate well with Microsoft Domain Services, you are able to make it as secure as you want.

There are useful visualizations available in the dashboards.

If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3.

In a future release, they need to have better integration to allow any visualization that is done in other solutions, such as D3 or Tableau, to be able to be imported in Microsoft BI easily.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.

The solution is stable when the database is reasonably sized. If you have large databases of 20 million rows it can begin to have difficulties requiring a purchase of more hardware.

The scalability is good. If you have a direct query, Microsoft BI can run on billions of rows of data.

Microsoft BI is available to the 70,000 users in my organization.

This solution is used extensively because everyone has access to it, not because it is the best.

The support from Microsoft could improve.

The solution is easy to install.

We did the implementation of the solution.

For those customers we have that use Microsoft BI on a dedicated server, we have a technical team that does the maintenance.

I have evaluated Tableau and D3.

I would recommend Microsoft BI over Tableau if you are comfortable with Microsoft solutions. Additionally, understand your use case and choose the best solution that fits your needs.

I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.

I'm a project manager and we are customers of Microsoft.

I like the toggling feature, the ability to switch from one page to another. 

I have a couple of dashboards that are weekly and monthly. I was able to download the dashboard, but I cannot paste any images into PowerPoint. There are also visuals based on the brand that should automatically pop up in the graph and which should be a toggling option. And I'm having performance issues if I want to add two or three tables at a time, which I could easily do in Tableau. Copy-pasting data to PowerPoint for presentation to the executive level should be easy but we're only able to copy the visual, not the underlying data. 

I've been using this solution for the past eight months. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't yet migrated everyone to Power BI. Our users are not finding Power BI as good as Pique, which perhaps they're just more used to. They're trying but some of the features available in Pique are not there so they are not comprehensively using it. It's being used mainly for internal analysis for now. 

We initially used Tableau because our data was an internal data source, and now all of our data is migrated to tool environments, that the Power BI is more comfortable with. BI is also a free product which is another reason the company recommends it.

The initial setup was straightforward, we have a Power BI admin team who take care of all that. 

Because of performance issues and because we're unable to do all the aggregation, I rate this solution six out of 10.