Microsoft Power BI vs ThoughtSpot comparison

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Microsoft Power BI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and ThoughtSpot compete in the business intelligence category. Based on the provided comparisons, Power BI seems to have an advantage due to its robust features and integration capabilities.

Features: Microsoft Power BI offers strong integration with the Microsoft ecosystem, self-service BI capabilities, and extensive data visualization tools. It connects easily with Azure and Office 365, making it a versatile tool for users already within the Microsoft environment. ThoughtSpot is noted for its powerful search-based analytics, enabling users to rapidly generate insights through natural language queries. Its live analytics feature allows seamless, on-the-fly data exploration.

Room for Improvement: Microsoft Power BI could improve by enhancing real-time data processing and expanding its integration with non-Microsoft products, alongside making the interface more user-friendly for non-technical users. ThoughtSpot should focus on offering more customization options for visualization, ensuring stability during updates, and improving database connectivity for large datasets. Additionally, streamlining import functionalities would help reduce redundancy issues.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Power BI provides deployment flexibility across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments while benefiting from extensive community support. ThoughtSpot, meanwhile, excels in private and on-premises environments and receives positive feedback for its proactive and engaging customer support, although it lacks the vast community resources available to Power BI users.

Pricing and ROI: Power BI is highlighted for its affordability with a free desktop version and tiered pricing models suitable for small and mid-sized businesses, offering a strong ROI. ThoughtSpot, priced higher, provides flexible options based on data usage, which can offer good value for enterprises focusing on search-based analytics despite the potential higher cost relative to Power BI.

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

Microsoft Power BI vs. ThoughtSpot

January 2025

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Helped 831,158 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 BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (1st)

ThoughtSpot

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

19th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Visualization (14th), Embedded BI (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.6%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThoughtSpot is 1.5%, up from 1.4% 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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Anthony Fiorino

SVP, Head of Enterprise Data Mgmt & Data Intelligence at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support

The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box. Of course, there's data modeling needed, and things like that, but I can throw it at a set, and I can get up and running in a matter of hours. If a new group comes to me and says, "Hey, I've heard about ThoughtSpot. I have some data and I want to be able to do some analytics, do some profiling, do some BI against it." In a couple of hours, I connect to their source and I just do it. Now for a production product, we have to model and perform it over time, but at least I can get people up and running extremely fast with a tool that's intuitive and easy to use.

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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

"One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably."

"Easy to use and the visualization is valuable."

"The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards."

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

"Easy to use. End-users can make changes to the graphics."

"What's most valuable in this tool is that it gives its users detailed error messages. It's a very stable data analytics tool, and it offers good scalability."

"The various different ETL tools within it and the ability to have different data refreshes and scheduled refreshes [real-time data refresh capabilities] have most significantly improved the data analysis processes."

"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases."

"It is easy to set up the solution."

"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."

"ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."

"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."

"The scalability is good."

"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."

"The initial setup was very straightforward."

Cons

"It is not yet ready for enterprises. For a big enterprise data model, it is not so stable, and it also doesn't scale so well."

"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."

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

"There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you."

"I would prefer that the solution not be shared. I'm concerned that if we make a mistake we could reveal information to people who shouldn't see it. I would like to have my own on-prem server, to buy my own server and have my own infrastructure for Microsoft BI, with only with my data."

"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."

"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."

"If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do."

"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."

"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."

"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."

"The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases."

"The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot."

"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."

"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."

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

"Power BI is cheaper than Tableau and Cognos."

"The solution's pricing is medium."

"Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."

"Microsoft BI is not expensive."

"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."

"Its pricing is great."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"I give the pricing a six out of ten."

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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

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare 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 ThoughtSpot?

It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?

I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It's better for me as I can control pricing a bit more easily.

What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?

We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to load or create our own custom calendar to actually need our fiscal year-end. With o...

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Product Reports

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

Download ThoughtSpot product report

December 2024

Also Known As

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

No data available

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Microsoft

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.

ThoughtSpot is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows easy searching and drilling into data. Its ad hoc exploration and query-based search features are highly valued, and it is easy to set up, stable, and scalable.

The solution is used for reporting purposes, self-service BI, and embedding into other applications for customers to do self-service analytics. It helps businesses with metrics, KPIs, and important insights by sourcing data from various sources into one golden source and visualizing it in an easy way for the business to consume. The pricing model is ideal, charging for data rather than the number of users.

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

Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs