Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The IT department has dashboards for reporting to the higher levels of management.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid model: cloud-based and on-premise. We always get the latest version because we have the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

We encourage end users to use Power BI because it's quite easy for them to interact with the menus and the navigation bar. Even for ordinary users, they can create their own dashboard using Power BI.

There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users. These improvements wouldn't be too technical.

I have been using Microsoft BI for a very long time—since it was first released.

The solution is stable enough, but I think Tableau has a better interactive UX and user experience. We are not using Tableau right now.

We have tens of thousands of users, and we are willing to increase the number of users.

Support is amazing.

I have experience with Tableau.

The license is on a yearly basis.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. I would recommend this solution for others. 

We don't have any other solution out there right now, so I would say we are satisfied with it. There are some disadvantages, some weaknesses of Microsoft Power BI that we have addressed to the Microsoft team.

The IT department has a good relationship with the Microsoft team, so they always give input to Microsoft's department teams.

We have both deployments for Microsoft BI, cloud, and the on-premise.

We are using SAP BI and Microsoft BI to augment the other.

Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs.

In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility.

When you create tables in Microsoft BI, you have to create them separately. I can't have several reports packed together in one document, whereby I can have different tabs. You could have several pages of your dashboard, such as a summary page with all the detail. However, in the paginated reports, you don't have that kind of flexibility. This is a major area that Microsoft needs to work on.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable. We did an enterprise-wide deployment and every one of the 500 people in the company uses it.

I have not needed to contact Microsoft or the local vendor.

We use SAP BI in parallel to Microsoft BI currently. Our plan is to replace the SAP BI with Power BI. The phase we are in now is to run both of them in parallel and see how everything is operating before we completely phase out SAP BI. The focus isn't on SAP or Power BI. It used to be our SAP BI solution. Since we started using Power BI, the plan is to actually discontinue SAP BI. maybe by next year we will no longer use the SAP BI.

I switched to Microsoft BI from SAP BI because, in my part of the world, it is becoming the most popular BI tool. Additionally, the ease of integration and our organization is a Microsoft shop. Everything is Microsoft, our databases, our ERP, and we use Microsoft dynamics and Business Center. 

The ease of integration of the BI tool is important for our organization. The scalability and then the licensing are good. If you choose the cloud for SAP BI, you have to spend more. The planning modules sometimes do not come with the package and you will need to spend on it.

It is not necessarily that Microsoft BI is better, but because there are other benefits when you consider Microsoft BI. The ease of integration with the DB and the ERP, and then you look at the overall cost.

The initial setup is simple to do.

We did the implementation ourselves. The solution does require maintenance.

The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive.

We pay annually for the license of the solution and we are using a premium license.

The choice of a BI tool is relative. If you have the capacity and the budget, you could decide to use SAP BI. There are other BI tools on the market. Why did we choose Microsoft BI is because of the nature of our business environment, the nature of your data, and many other factors that have to be considered.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of then.

We're using it for sales information and production information. Pushing a report into Power BI makes it easier to use and a little bit more powerful.

We're using the most recent version of the solution.

The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it.

We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses.

We've had Microsoft BI for about two years, and we are using it currently. It's a part of Microsoft Teams.

It's stable. 

I don't know if it's scalable to the point that we want it. It seems to fit where we have it. We haven't really looked at its scalability. We have other tools, but it works well for what it's doing today.

There are roughly half a dozen users of this solution, and it has sales-related information. There is one driver, and she merges the information. So, there aren't too many rules at this point.

We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time.

It has been good.

That would've been Excel. So, it isn't a switch; it is growth.

It was easy. We had a good understanding of being able to map two programs together. We had a little training, but otherwise, it was good.

The program installation took a few days, but it took weeks to make the intelligence and the company information look right.

We did it ourselves. We had an individual who worked with it in the past. She picked it up very quickly because she was already trained.

We don't need anybody specific for its maintenance.

We didn't evaluate any other options. The use of Power BI just came with the program, and we installed it. We weren't looking for something different. It just was there for us to use.

My advice to others who are looking into implementing this product is that it is important that they understand their information. They have to understand how the program works, but they also have to understand their information for it to work better.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We use Microsoft BI to fetch data from one server in SSMS to another server.

I find many of the features of Microsoft BI valuable, in particular, I use the data flow tasks, look up and incremental loading of data. They have also introduced Hadoop in the control flow task.

I have created particular dashboards for a specific project so that I can show the clients the data related to their needs. Being able to show them a visual of the percentages in a pie chart has been very effective.

The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it.

In my last project, I worked with SSMS as my source and Oracle as my destination. This meant that there were certain compatibility issues between the two. I recommend for incremental load that Microsoft BI can include one task to overcome this concern.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for six years.

Most of my experience was with MS BI, with Power BI the difference is mainly in the report sections. It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS.

If you are not comfortable with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS, there are many tutorials available for MS BI, especially if you are new to the solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an 8 out of 10.

Our company is a manufacturing firm. We have an ERP running in our company. I develop the reports for the business that include sales, stock and production related information. These dashboards are used for analytics purposes by management, enabling them to make decisions regarding the products and business improvement.

We use the BI text file and summarize the information on dashboards to help management make the right decisions for the business. The information includes production figures, running status, forecasts and actual positions. 

We have 10  users of this solution.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is the ease of use. The data can be accessed from anywhere. We control access through Office 365.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI. Microsoft does regular updates, new features are added every month or so.

I have been using Microsoft BI for one year.

Microsoft Power BI is stable with no issue.

The solution is scalable.

Overall, technical support is good.

Prior to using Microsoft BI, we had been using OBIEE. Oracle is a complicated product with poor visuals. Comparing with Microsoft BI, we found Microsoft to have better handling, graphics, features, and easier development and coding. 

The initial deployment of Microsoft BI was relatively easy. We installed it to the machine and connected it to our Oracle database.

We were able to install the solution ourselves internally.

Microsoft BI requires licenses.

Microsoft Power BI is an easy product. If you have some idea about the business intelligence solutions and some technical knowledge, it is a self-deployed solution.

I would rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

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

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

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

We are using the product for some data tasks such as data binding and reporting. That's it.

The customization and management are very easy. 

We have found that the reporting and publishing are great. Sometimes people like to use the report for their teams.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The solution is scalable.

It's reliable and the performance has been good.

The cost of the product is not too high.

You need to purchase upgraded support separately.

The marketing will need to increase more now. Power BI is a good product, however, from Microsoft, and I'm not getting too much marketing information about new features or anything like that. People don't know the capabilities and they really should.

We find the solution to be stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable.

The product can scale. It's not an issue.

You do need to purchases specific support in order to get a good amount of attention. If you are a company that needs 24/7 support, you need to pay for it.

The basic support is good, although it is a little slow. 

The Microsoft support model has it set up so that a first call will only get a user to their ambassador. Okay. Their ambassador will not have too much knowledge. They just identify what is the issue then they escalate to their team. Microsoft support could improve their services to attempt to have a first call resolution. Right now, in most cases, the first call resolution is not possible.

We did not use a different solution previously.

Power BI is a fast application. Therefore, the setup is very, very easy. You just license it, sign up, and you can use it.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not overly expensive, although you will need to pay for extra support if you think you will need assistance regularly.

We only looked at Microsoft. We did not consider other options. 

We are Microsoft partners.

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

I am a Power BI technical senior developer and consultant and I use Power BI to provide solutions for my clients.

Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features. When I say "missing features", I mean it in the sense that, even if you don't have a direct feature to do something, there are quite a few workarounds that you can figure out with DAX and M Query to make different situations work. I think these two are really the soul of the tool because they make a lot of impossible things possible.

There's a lot of room for improvement because Power BI is a new tool and hasn't really been in the market for that long, especially considering alternative tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau which have been around for more than a decade. Because Power BI is younger than those tools, I feel it hasn't reached a certain level of maturity that comes with time and it is lacking in quite a few areas which I'm hoping will be seen to in the future, given how it has been progressing so far with its new releases.

There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another.

When it comes to the feature's functionality, that's all fine, but, say, for instance, that you want to go ahead and turn off only the sub totals and not the grand totals. This might not be immediately possible, especially if you are working in a project where your technical solution is the backend site which the users don't quite care about. What they care about is what they see and interact with, and the visuals and formatting (and visual settings) at hand are what really matter to them.

This is where I think standardization really needs to come in. Basic stuff like being able to selectively turn on or off only the sub totals or grand totals. There should be certain formatting options which should be standard across every visual. What options you get here, you should also get over there, for example. These are simple things, but many a time it's something the end user takes very seriously. They generally do not care about what's happening in the background with regard to the calculations and everything else.

In essence, the standard visualizations should have features and options in common with one another, even when it comes to other visualization tools such as bar charts and line charts. These are all pretty basic visualization features, and giving them some standard way to be customized will make them as capable and competitive as what other tools allow you to do. Of course, you can do this if you add your own custom visuals from the library, but when it comes to basic default stuff, they should at least be deep enough in terms of standard customization to compete.

Right now it seems like they're trying to add a lot of features, but at the expense of losing out on the essence of the basics. The basics in Power BI should be equally as good as the basics in any other tool, and in this case I believe it to be a problem of adding more depth to certain features. The width, and variety, of features is not a problem for me. Whatever features are already available need to be deep enough to work with comfortably, and I feel this is where Microsoft needs to direct its focus.

I have been in the BI world for about six or seven years now and for the last few years it's all been Power BI for me.

Their support is a little slow in the sense that when I post a question to them, I don't get a response as fast as I'd like. Unless you're a premium user and you've got a dedicated technical support team — that's a different thing.

When it comes the usual Microsoft bugs, they generally don't come up with solutions too quickly. And many a time they don't even have a running solution; some bug fixes will probably only be part of the next release. Even then, however, the new releases are themselves often not terribly stable. Whenever you get a new feature, you almost know that this one's not going to work as perfectly as you would want it to. So you just have to wait for the next one, and that's what it is. It takes a little while to stabilize. This kind of thing, along with their support in general, can probably be sped up a little bit.

I am certified in MicroStrategy and have worked with it for several years. However, most of the business I am getting lately is all Power BI.

In my experience, everybody is switching from either MicroStrategy to Power BI or Tableau to Power BI. I'm hearing and seeing this going on in the market, for some very good reasons. I'm no longer working with MicroStrategy, but not because I don't like it. It's simply that I'm not getting enough work in that area.

Setup is very easy. In Power BI that's one thing you will find across the board when using it. It is very easy in terms of getting something done. Even complex things can be done in a pretty easy way and there's no complex challenge in it.

The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side.

That said, many times people are attracted by its affordable price tag, but then they see that it doesn't do everything they want and they conclude that that was the reason why it was so cheap. There's a problem with this kind of thinking, because even though it might not have everything, the price is still on the cheaper side compared to other analysis products like MicroStrategy. The complete suite of features from MicroStrategy is very costly, but at the same time there's no doubt that it can achieve a lot.

What you get with Power BI is that you start to find that even simple stuff requires a lot of gymnastics to achieve because there's no in-built, straightforward feature for it and you need to come up with a workaround. There are a few too many workarounds needed for my comfort, but otherwise it's a very good tool and it's one of my favorites. The pricing is competitive for a reason.

If you are looking for tabular reporting, then Power BI is not the tool for you. This isn't something that Microsoft speaks much about, and in my experience, if you want to do tabular reporting then there first has to be something in Power BI which can actually take loads of data and print it out on visuals in a tabular way, which is currently lacking. Power BI is really designed for analytical dashboarding and that's what it does best. For tabular reporting, on the other hand, it's better to just get the data exported out into Excel and do the rest there.

I would rate Microsoft PowerBI a seven out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for the reports. We use it a lot for self-reporting.

We're making a dashboard that can show specific details and can be easily customized. It's very useful for creating dashboards.

The reporting is good.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale it if we need to.

It's a very easy-to-use solution. The product is quite user-friendly.

The initial installation is difficult. 

The pricing is a bit high and we'd like it to be less expensive.

I've used the solution for two years now.

The product is stable. Its performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is good. If a company wants to, it can expand.

We have about 15 to 20 people that use the solution.

We're not sure if we will expand usage in the future or not. That's still to be decided.

We manage technical support ourselves. We do not need to reach out to Microsoft for help. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

I found the initial setup to be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. The deployment might take about an hour.

We use three people for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We have to pay for licensing. I've paid for a license in the past.

We'd like for it to be a little less expensive.

I would recommend the solution to others based on its ease of use.