Board vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Board International and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Board International is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.7, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9. Board International holds a 0.5% mindshare in BIT, compared to Microsoft’s 22.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Board International users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Board

Read 36 Board reviews

646 Views
453 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 318 Microsoft Power BI reviews

25,672 Views
20,611 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Board

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Board and Microsoft Power BI compete in the business intelligence and analytics market. Microsoft Power BI is seen as the leading product due to its extensive features and value for money.

Features: Board includes effective budgeting, planning, and forecasting tools, ideal for finance-centered applications, while offering performance management capabilities. Microsoft Power BI provides advanced data visualization, integration capabilities, and broad data connectivity support, emphasizing data analytics and extensive reporting features.

Room for Improvement: Board could enhance its user interface to make it more intuitive and improve documentation for non-technical users. It could also expand on pre-built templates for quicker deployment. Power BI could improve training resources for beginners, enhance its mobile experience, and streamline performance with very large data sets.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Board offers a tailored deployment model adaptable to organizational requirements but may require more time and effort. Microsoft Power BI features a straightforward, cloud-based deployment enabling rapid integration with wide-reaching online resources and comprehensive customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Board generally involves higher setup costs with customization but offers excellent ROI in finance-specific sectors. Microsoft Power BI is more cost-effective, with lower initial costs and flexible pricing, providing higher ROI through its scalability and applicability in various scenarios.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Board

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

23rd

Ranking in Reporting

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (10th)

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Board is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.6%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features

I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.

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Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background."

"Now, we have only one version of the truth."

"The ability to do write back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation."

"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."

"We can build reports super fast."

"All the reports are prepared automatically."

"It is useful for self-analysis regarding company data and helps to find areas where we can improve."

"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."

More Board pros

"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."

"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."

"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."

"Microsoft BI was very helpful for me because I had a huge variety of connections. It is very convenient to build reports, even if somebody has no experience using BI tools or data visualizations. Additionally, the performance is very good when generating reports."

"Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly."

"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."

"In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results."

"We have plans to use the AI mechanisms and algorithms that Power BI uses to publish more easy-to-understand reports for our customers."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"It would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website."

"One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes."

"We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."

"We would like to see better logging in the procedural world."

"It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use."

"I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers that aren't particularly technical."

"It would be nice to see truly transferable processes from model to model, as well as a method of building repetitive processes."

"Sometimes, the data disappears from the product."

More Board cons

"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."

"Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows."

"I have found using Microsoft BI is not easy. For example, trying to use the auto-refresh feature is not simple."

"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."

"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."

"Powerpoints are not available in the report server."

"The solution could improve by providing more free visuals. A lot of them are very nice but you have to purchase them."

"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."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"Power BI is cheaper for smaller groups when comparing to competitors. It requires a monthly per-user subscription."

"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."

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

"Regarding cost, the initial investment wasn't too high, but ongoing licensing could add up."

"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."

"Licensing is on a monthly basis, but I am not sure."

"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."

"Compared to others, I think it is reasonable."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...

See all answers

What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Board?

Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would like to leverage or prioritize predictive analytics as the main feature, but som...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 29% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 11% of the time

Pigment vs Board

Compared 11% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Board

Compared 8% of the time

More Board Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Board

January 2025

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

December 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Learn More

Board International

Microsoft

Overview

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Sample Customers

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

Free Report: Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

Find out what your peers are saying about Board vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

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