Microsoft Power BI vs Windward Core comparison

Microsoft and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9, while Windward Studios is ranked #25. Microsoft holds a 26.9% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 319 Microsoft Power BI reviews

15,963 Views
12,670 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

518 Views
165 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Windward Core 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. Windward Core Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Windward Core

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

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)

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

25th

Average Rating

8.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

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 Windward Core is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

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

Hit Mistry

Vice President at PSC Group, LLC

It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes

Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.

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

"I like how the Query Editor lets me manipulate the data, and the available visuals are good. You can do everything using the UI."

"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."

"What I liked most about the tool is that we can use text queries to create projects and modify columns according to our needs. There are hundreds of YouTube courses on how to use it."

"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."

"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."

"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."

"The solution's initial setup isn't too complicated."

"The solution is easy to use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."

"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."

"The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers."

"The usually the response is within one hour. The technical support will WebEx with you. I rate them as a 10 out of 10."

"The design tool, with all of its features and sample output fidelity tests, and being able to work with JSON data and output PDF and HTML, were also both crucial."

"You can use Microsoft Office as your designer interface. There is very little programming. You can have nontechnical people create reports."

"The quality of the layouts and designs is second to none. Windward's ability to help us generate templates, for which we can actually tag documents, is the key feature that we use."

"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS."

"It needs a wizard that covers all its options."

"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."

"We identified a couple of issues in the reports. Some reports took too long to load, particularly at the end of our data refresh."

"Licensing could be improved."

"Integration with artificial intelligence would help. Humans take time to review the data and eliminate errors. Artificial intelligence based on machine learning and understanding can bring the same functionality."

"The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards."

"I am a SAP user and I would like this tool to have more connectors - and to more easily connect to - the ERP or SAP environment."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."

"One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API."

"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."

"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."

"It is software, so there are always times where things don't work. Most of the time issues happen when trying to move to a new version. There might be problems with reports that were created in an older version, so either we have to make a tweak to the templates or we report it to them and get them to make an adjustment to their software."

"The tool does not support macOS documents."

"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."

"It needs better support for upgrades and more control over layout of elements. Upgrades tend to break existing output. Elements do not position where expected due to insertion of blank lines and page breaks. It takes time to fix these through trial and error."

More Windward Core cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"We view it as an expensive product."

"It is based on the usage. If you're using it, you pay for it, and if you're not using it, you stop paying for it."

"I think it's a good price, from what I've heard. I know it's competitive with other Power BI tools."

"The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user."

"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."

"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."

"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."

"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."

"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."

"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."

"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

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...

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 ...

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Comparisons

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 15% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% 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

SAP Crystal Reports vs Windward Core

Compared 55% of the time

Docmosis vs Windward Core

Compared 45% of the time

More Windward Core Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

February 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

January 2025

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

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

Windward, Windward Studios

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

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

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

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Windward Core

January 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. Windward Core

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