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Microsoft Power BI vs Yellowfin comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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
Ranking in Reporting
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
332
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Yellowfin
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
35th
Ranking in Reporting
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (22nd), Embedded BI (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 7.6%, down from 14.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI7.6%
Yellowfin1.1%
Other91.3%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Interactive dashboards have transformed restaurant data into faster daily business decisions
Microsoft Power BI has many features and there is not a lot to improve. However, the licensing can be confusing. When deciding between Pro and Premium, I find it difficult to distinguish what features are offered by Pro and what features are offered by Premium, including the particular differences to choose between both licensing models. Additionally, some features such as DAX, which I mentioned previously, involve DAX calculations and complex data modeling, which are somewhat advanced and not easily understandable. Prior knowledge is required or you need to go through the documentation. If the documentation is made comprehensive so that anyone with no knowledge on DAX can easily use it by going through the documentation, it would be really helpful. Additionally, if the integration with non-Microsoft tools is improved and performance is optimized, then Microsoft Power BI can become a top-ranked visualization tool. The user experience with Microsoft Power BI is quite good. The intuitive user interface makes it easy for both technical and non-technical users to create reports. However, only the advanced features are somewhat complex, and if the documentation is improved, it can be easily accessible.
AC
‎IS Executive at SAINS
It is a central source of up-to-date data and information, but needs more charting capabilities
Management information Reporting Statistics Data analysis It reduces sending copies of different report/spreadsheet versions over email, which makes it difficult to access the right report. It is also able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout.  All management…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Microsoft SSAS is one of the best BI suites on the market."
"The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."
"We were able to reduce costs by consolidating the 3 Crystal Report Servers down to just one server running SSRS (with one backup just in case)."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are the variety of possibilities to connect to various data sources. The visualizations are easily done, have useful rollover functions, and there are continuous updates being made to the system. You can benefit from the various improvements."
"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."
"I've seen no issues with BI's stability."
"It is a pretty straightforward and flexible solution for data integration and modeling."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"Yellowfin doesn’t try to do everything – it is a BI presentation and communication tool, and it does it brilliantly."
"It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis."
"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
 

Cons

"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"When I want to use my old code in Power BI, it doesn't handle it, and that was also annoying."
"We haven't used it that long and I haven't come across anything that's stood out as needing to be fixed."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. ​"
"It should have more report outputs. They should expand the report outputs. Its documentation should also be better."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"Sluggish performance when handling large amounts of data."
"The initial installation is difficult."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
"The first release was a bit buggy, but they seem to have gotten on top of that very quickly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a premium Power BI license in-house that's quite an expensive license. It's $10 a month for four users and then I think 35,000 at the premium rate."
"Microsoft BI is not expensive. Compared to the price of other BI products, the price is very fair."
"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."
"In general, Microsoft BI's price is lower compared to Alteryx."
"From a cost point of view, it's competitive in the enterprise space, although it's not as competitive when you add up all of the additional costs. Things like integrations cost extra and it's probably where Microsoft makes more of the money."
"It is reasonably priced."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
"I used the tool's free version."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Construction Company
18%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business137
Midsize Enterprise59
Large Enterprise171
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...
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 ...
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Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
No data available
 

Overview

 

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
NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Yellowfin and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
917,743 professionals have used our research since 2012.