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

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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

"It is in the cloud, which makes it easy for mobile access of reports and data."

"The interface is very easy to use."

"Real-time refresh is quite interesting and user-friendly, provided you have access to a gateway. It works well."

"The user experience is easy. Users get familiar with it quickly."

"It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary."

"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."

"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."

"We have found the product to be scalable."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain."

"Some of our clients are looking at the nested filtering which is coming out. That's going to be a huge benefit for them because they're going to be able to nest and loop while they're also looking at filtering out certain data elements."

"The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically."

"The most valuable features are the ability for it to be integrated into our software solution and the AutoTag tool that allows us to quite quickly create and update the templates themselves."

"The ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT."

"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."

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

"Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

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

"If you have to pull multiple data sources performance is somewhat lacking."

"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."

"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."

"The real-time data refresh capabilities is one of the things I had issues with"

"More connections with other systems should be added, which would allow for other integrations."

"The biggest thing with Microsoft right now is better support. There should be more timely support. We can do 90% of it ourselves by the same token. When we're into the 10%, we do not get timely support via Microsoft's support team."

"They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."

"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."

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

"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."

"The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem."

"AutoTag needs to be web-based, so our customers can create reports from our web."

"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."

"They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time."

More Windward Core cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing can be complicated."

"Power BI comes with enterprise Microsoft licensing. So for the user, you don't have to pay, but you do have to pay a one-time cost."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"Downloading Power BI Desktop is free."

"Microsoft BI is not expensive."

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

"Power BI premium is really expensive for our market. A lot of small and medium companies would like to purchase it, but they can't afford it."

"Their price is good."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"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 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."

"I can't advise anybody about pricing and licensing, but it was competitive. A lot of things we did look at were all volume-based, so it was a case of you buy a license to generate this many reports a year, and that's not something that I'm particularly interested in because it doesn't give you any idea - if we have future growth, or if we have a lean year - for budgeting reasons it's more difficult. With Windward it's a straight out license fee, whether we generate one page or we generate a million, it makes no difference."

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

"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."

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

"Pricing is a bit higher than normal desktop applications, but it's well worth it. The ROI is simple to understand and the monthly payment for an annual license is affordable and worth it."

"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."

More Windward Core 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…

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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

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

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