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Microsoft Power BI vs Yellowfin comparison

 

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
6.7
Number of Reviews
329
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Yellowfin
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
36th
Ranking in Reporting
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (21st), Embedded BI (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 9.3%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI9.3%
Yellowfin0.9%
Other89.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Flor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group
Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards
Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.
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

"It seems stable. I haven't heard of any difficulties from my clients that utilize Power BI."
"This product is good in terms of cost, it is pretty easy to implement, and I can recommend it for those features and the reporting."
"The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation."
"Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs."
"Management reporting solution that's very stable and scalable."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves​."
"We find Power BI is more direct, it is much easier to connect to other data sources and so forth."
"Yellowfin doesn’t try to do everything – it is a BI presentation and communication tool, and it does it brilliantly."
"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
"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."
 

Cons

"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."
"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."
"SSMS & SSRS."
"One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel."
"The integration with other solutions could be improved for reporting aspects."
"I feel the modeling page should be simplified."
"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."
"Automation could be improved and performance enhanced."
"The first release was a bit buggy, but they seem to have gotten on top of that very quickly."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Paid for itself in the first month."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge."
"The price of Microsoft BI is expensive. We found the price of Tableau to be less expensive."
"I would rate them 4 out of 5 for their current pricing. There are no additional costs to the standard licensing fees."
"Microsoft Power BI has reasonable pricing."
"It is a cheap solution for our needs."
"The premium capacity is very costly in respect of the market in Egypt, amounting to $5,000 monthly."
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
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Educational Organization
17%
Healthcare Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Transportation Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business135
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise166
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: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.