Microsoft Power BI vs Pyramid Analytics comparison

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Microsoft Power BI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and Pyramid Analytics are competitive products in the data analytics and business intelligence category. Power BI seems to have the upper hand with its strong integration capabilities with Microsoft products and cost-effective pricing, while Pyramid Analytics stands out in advanced analytics and DAX query support.

Features: Microsoft Power BI offers a wide range of data visualization options, seamless data integration with other Microsoft products, and appealing graphical visualizations. Pyramid Analytics provides robust support for DAX queries, detailed data lineage capabilities, and advanced statistical and predictive analytics.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Power BI requires enhancements in user interface intuitiveness, management of complex relationships, and handling large data volumes. Additionally, users desire more flexibility in visualization options and better connectors for non-Microsoft data sources. Pyramid Analytics could improve with faster data refreshes for large datasets, more intuitive user interfaces, and improved documentation for new users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Power BI offers flexible deployment options, including Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and On-Premises, and benefits from extensive online resources and an active community for support, although direct support is mixed. Pyramid Analytics supports diverse environments like Hybrid Cloud and On-Premises, with deployment flexibility well-regarded. However, detailed customer service experiences are less documented for Pyramid compared to the community-driven support for Power BI.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Power BI is considered cost-effective, with flexible licensing options appealing to small and large businesses, and is noted for its quick ROI through streamlined reporting. In contrast, Pyramid Analytics, being more costly, offers competitive pricing that is particularly advantageous for detailed data analysis capabilities in larger organizations, with its ROI perceived positively.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Pyramid Analytics Report (Updated: July 2025).

Microsoft Power BI vs. Pyramid Analytics

July 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

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

321

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (1st)

Pyramid Analytics

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

15th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 20.7%, down from 21.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pyramid Analytics is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

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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Shyam Pendyala

Manager, BI Platforms at Refinitiv, an LSEG Business at LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group)

A comprehensive and user-friendly business intelligence for enhanced data insight

When developing multidimensional IMDS models in Pyramid Analytics, there is a need for better features to maintain and analyze data. The application currently lacks the ability to easily track the original physical table and field names, making it challenging to relate them to business names. It would be desirable to have the possibility to generate a data dictionary, detailing the original physical tables, renamed fields, and derived fields. Such features would simplify documentation, facilitate understanding of how calculations depend on physical fields and aid in explaining the development process to others. Having this lineage and easy-to-generate data dictionary would greatly enhance the usability of Pyramid Analytics for developers.

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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 most valuable features are the easy creation of reports, dashboards, and the ability to perform analysis. It is important for us to create reports because we have some operations during certain hours and we can use this tool to track the information."

"The scalability overall has been quite good."

"The solution makes it easy for me to develop reports and publish them."

"Provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting."

"Good CS and administration."

"The initial setup is simple to do."

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

"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."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"The most valuable feature of Pyramid Analytics, outshining even top-tier platforms like Power BI, is its robust support for DAX queries."

"I think the most valuable Pyramid Analytics feature is the solution's ability to drill down and dice in the loop. I think it is better than InExcel or Power BI."

"The on-premise version has quite good scalability."

"The features I find most valuable are 'Discover,' 'Formulate,' and 'Model.' I use them regularly to build logic and create reports for my job."

"It proved to be a very powerful and useful tool due to its breakdown capabilities, easy reporting features, flexibility in building custom calculations, and the ability to integrate them into reports."

"Pyramid has a wide level of uses, as it's a complete ETL process and has a good level of connecting to a lot of data sources."

"It seems quite performant in analyzing multi-dimensional information sets and presenting them."

"It offers a wide range of analytics options including statistics and visualizations, as well as prediction capabilities, allowing users to make forecasts based on the latest data."

Cons

"I think that the product would benefit by increasing the range of visuals and graphics readily available, as opposed to using a third party included as part of the product."

"The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version."

"In an upcoming release, the solution could be simplified and have a more complete product package rather than a suite of products that we have to put together."

"Licensing could be improved."

"Its desktop tool is a little bit memory CPU intensive, and it can be improved, but the machines nowadays come with a lot of memory. For the desktop users who are using it on the desktop, we recommend that they do an upgrade. It is a minor issue. We can fix it on the desktop."

"I have found that some issues exist, indicating room for improvement in scalability."

"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."

"I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that. Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"I think the graphic number of charts and components could be higher, at least comparable to Brain Power BI."

"There is room for improvement in terms of documentation and examples, especially for newcomers like me who are learning both business intelligence and Pyramid."

"Even though the solution has a functionality for every step, it's not so well- defined. That needs to be improved."

"There is room for improvement in terms of the user interface, particularly when it comes to modifying connections between filters and visual components in a dashboard."

"It would be desirable to have the possibility to generate a data dictionary, detailing the original physical tables, renamed fields, and derived fields."

"Pyramid Analytics could improve by speeding up data refresh, especially for large datasets."

"I find that this is quite a heavy, time-consuming tool for developers."

"The general amount of negative comments that I am hearing from my team makes me very wary."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not very familiar with the licensing aspect, as it operates in the cloud as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Essentially, you pay based on cloud cost models, which might include hourly rates or similar billing structures introduced by Microsoft. Many organizations utilize it and pay for its services, somewhat like Office 365. It's a cloud-based platform that provides the necessary services, including support, for development, and you pay accordingly for the usage."

"Power BI is cheaper than Tableau and Cognos."

"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."

"We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person."

"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."

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

"There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."

"We view it as an expensive product."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The licensing cost is not excessively expensive, but it does increase with the addition of new features and modules."

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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

Educational Organization

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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...

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 ...

What do you like most about Pyramid Analytics?

The most valuable feature of Pyramid Analytics, outshining even top-tier platforms like Power BI, is its robust support for DAX queries.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pyramid Analytics?

I find the price of Pyramid Analytics to be quite reasonable, especially when compared to other tools in the industry. It is a cost-effective choice, particularly for mid-sized or larger companies ...

What needs improvement with Pyramid Analytics?

Pyramid Analytics could improve by speeding up data refresh, especially for large datasets. While it is currently an in-memory tool, efforts are underway to enhance direct connections to source sys...

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Product Reports

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Microsoft Power BI

June 2025

Download Pyramid Analytics product report

June 2025

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

The BI Office from Pyramid Analytics is a web-based governed data discovery and analytics platform. It integrates the four principal functions of any comprehensive BI strategy into a single, seamless application. Users can now analyze, present, report and predict on their data in a single application. Pyramid Analytics has native apps to cover the entire mobile spectrum, iOS, Android and Windows. With BI Office users can integrate SAP data with data from other sources giving them the right tools and better data to make data-driven decisions.

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

US Department of Veterans Affair, Volkswagen, Siemens, Blackboard, Hallmark, Orange, CDW, LA Fitness, Atelier GS, Memorial Healthcare, Acadia Insurance, BancoBic, Advanced Learning, Microsoft, Drake University