Microsoft Power BI vs Plotly comparison

Microsoft and Plotly are both solutions in the Reporting category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9, while Plotly is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.7. Microsoft holds a 26.9% mindshare in RT, compared to Plotly’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Plotly users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 319 Microsoft Power BI reviews

16,446 Views
13,136 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Plotly

Read 3 Plotly reviews

751 Views
695 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Plotly

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Plotly based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

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

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly

January 2025

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Helped 832,138 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

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

319

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st)

Plotly

Ranking in Reporting

18th

Average Rating

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 26.9%, up from 25.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Plotly is 1.1%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

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Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal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

Founder & CEO at Ira

A flexible tool that offers an open-source version

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten. In my company, there are around five resources that use the product. My company's clients use the product a lot on a daily basis. I use the product twice a week in my company before I get any call from our clients.

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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

"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"

"It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report."

"The tool's most valuable features are slicer and Microsoft Copilot integration. It also allows users to see reports on mobile devices. The solution can also integrate with various data sources."

"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."

"Microsoft BI is scalable."

"Management reporting solution that's very stable and scalable."

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

"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets."

"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me."

"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."

Cons

"I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint."

"SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly."

"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."

"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."

"We haven't used it that long and I haven't come across anything that's stood out as needing to be fixed."

"The product could have better analytics capabilities."

"It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved."

"Microsoft BI has its own challenges in terms of user interface and how quickly somebody can learn how to use it."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information."

"I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement."

"The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase them annually."

"The solution's pricing is medium."

"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."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

"You don't need a license for 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."

"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

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

"As far as I am aware you do not need a license for the solution."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"I only use the free tier of the product."

"It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices could be on the premium side."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Reporting solutions are best for your needs.

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832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

21%

Manufacturing Company

12%

University

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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

What do you like most about Plotly?

It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Plotly?

It is an open-source tool. My company hasn't explored Plotly's premium services yet, but I believe the prices are on the premium side. I rate the product price as five or six on a scale of one to t...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Plotly?

I believe that the price of the tool's paid services is on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement.

See all answers

Comparisons

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau vs Plotly

Compared 42% of the time

TIBCO Spotfire vs Plotly

Compared 15% of the time

More Plotly Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

Reporting

January 2025

Download Plotly product report

Also Known As

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

No data available

Overview

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

Plotly creates leading open source tools for composing, editing, and sharing interactive data visualization via the Web.

Our collaboration servers (available in cloud or on premises) allow data scientists to showcase their work, make graphs without coding, and collaborate with business analysts, designers, executives, and clients.

Plotly

Sample Customers

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

Google, Goji, VIT, Smpl Bio, U.S. Air Force, C12 Energy, New York University

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly

January 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly

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

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