Board vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Board International and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Board International is ranked #24 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 21.8% 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

586 Views
409 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 319 Microsoft Power BI reviews

23,544 Views
18,579 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: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

February 2025

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Helped 842,296 peers since 2012

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

24th

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

319

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Board is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 21.8%, down from 22.7% 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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James Balbach

Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network

Robust system consistently elevates data visualization and seamlessly updates with user-driven advancements

Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"A lot of flexibility from the data modeling standpoint. It can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model itself, we have that flexibility."

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

"Instead of taking two people a week each month to perform our internal KPI reporting, the same two people can have it done in a day."

"It allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports."

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

"All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online."

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

More Board pros

"The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics."

"I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."

"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."

"I like Microsoft BI's drill-down feature and its overall ease of use."

"I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool."

"One of the most valuable aspects of this tool is its ease of use and the ability to easily share information with others."

"It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite."

"Connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless compared to Cognos."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout in terms of stability."

"Some of our users are still using an MS Office add-in for Excel for certain calculations, and when they export from Board, some of the values, some of the totals and column names, are not coming through into Excel."

"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."

"My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. "

"I would like to see a better Web client, where the controls work the same way as in the Windows client. I do think that the focus is now on the Web, so it should be improved upon."

"We can't delete entities and cubes in Boards because it interrupts our whole data model."

"The setup was a bit complex."

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

More Board cons

"I would like to see a change in the premium capacity."

"It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency."

"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."

"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."

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

"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."

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

"Powerpoints are not available in the report server."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

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

"All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years."

"I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable."

"The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided."

"Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level. They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it."

"It depends upon the tier of your Office 365 subscription. On E5, which is a Microsoft Azure subscription, you get it for free. If you are on a lower tier, you can subscribe for $10 a month per user, which is really cheap."

"If you purchase a license for a server, for users, or the professional version, you might not have to. The free version I think it can satisfy many customers' needs."

"We view it as an expensive product."

"The solution is affordable."

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

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

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 30% of the time

Pigment vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Board

Compared 7% of the time

More Board Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 15% 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 8% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Board

March 2025

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2025

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

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.

Board International

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.

Microsoft

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

February 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: February 2025.

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