Microsoft Power BI Reviews

For the most part, clients require dashboards. We are developing quite a few dashboards for them.

The solution has improved a lot within the organization. We can view chunks of data and detailed data at various levels. 

When we have done training in the cloud previously, I have a long experience in BI tools. I've worked on Cognos BI, Informatica, and other tools including QlikView. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

There are some great automation elements in the product.

It's a good tool and designing dashboards is easy.

In SAP, we have a suite of components here in a single module. This includes forecasting and budgeting. There's also a smart answers section. Whenever we design any chart or something, the tool provides some information regarding that data. That would be quite a good feature that could be included in future versions of Microsoft BI.

The licensing could be a bit better.

You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI.

I've used the solution for about one year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. I haven't had issues with it crashing or freezing.

The scalability is great. If you need to expand the product, you can do so. You can easily add more users. 

I'm not sure how many users are using the product. 

Technical support is great. I've worked with them before and have been happy with their level of service. 

I've previously used Cognos BI. I've also had the opportunity to work with SAP.

I haven't got any opportunity to install any Power BI system. That said, for tutorial purposes, I have installed the desktop version in my system. It was very smooth.

It took 30 to 40 minutes for me to install the desktop version. During my learning phase, I prepared one dashboard. Similar to when I worked on Cognos BI, there were some features that we have to hard code and incorporate manually. There is some automation in Power BI. For example, if we are designing some interactive things we have to write code possibly. Still, even having to write code, in Power BI, was a very smooth experience.

We have people on our team that can handle maintenance tasks. 

We had a team of five to six people that handled the implementation in-house.

The client is continuing to use it, likely due to the fact that they see some sort of ROI. However, I don't have exact metrics. 

I'd prefer if the licensing was a bit better.

The customers need to pay the licensing fee. I can't speak to the exact pricing for their contract.

Typically, the solution architect is the one who decides which tool to use. However, we also were there and had a brainstorming session before choosing the tools. We did look at open-source options. At the time I prepared one checklist comparison between all the tools available in the market. Those included SAP, QlikView, and Tableau.

We are an integrator and a partner. We are providing support activities to one of our clients.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

On-premises

We use it for data visualization.

It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc.

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.

It is absolutely stable.

It is absolutely scalable. You can scale it a lot.

It has been straightforward and easy. 

In terms of maintenance, for the most part, it is fairly low-maintenance. Once you have it set, it is fire-and-forget. The users want to see the view and the information, and there is nothing more to do other than just let it be.

I would give it an eight out of 10. It is a pretty powerful tool.

We use that solution to provide all the KPIs for the software development to manage the business, et cetera.

The solution is very helpful for managing the business. 

The initial setup is easy.

We have found the scalability to be quite good.

Stability is excellent overall.

Technical support is good.

For managing the business, it's okay, however, as a product management tool, it's lacking. I would like to use BI to provide services for the customers eventually. Microsoft's solution is not good for improving the product for the customers. It's just good for managing the business, and not supporting the customers.

The solution doesn't integrate well with third-party tools.

I'd like them to add to the knowledge base, or at least to offer more documentation about how to use the solution.

It would be helpful if more AI was integrated into the solution. 

I['ve used the solution since 2013.

I find the product to be quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability of the product is quite good. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

We get technical support from a third party, however, they offer very good support and we have been quite happy with their level of service. They always have enough staff. 

The implementation process is straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult.

Deployment took less than a month.

I'm also aware of Power BI, which has better integration with third-party tools.

We do not sell Microsoft products. We just use them.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using.

We use both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I'd recommend the solution to others as the management portion of the solution is very easy.

We have a startup focused on analytics around sports and athletes' performance. The data sits in our platform called Hercules, which is exposed through an ODBC connector or API layer. We're currently building a connector to expose that data in a consumable way, inside Power BI (with one connector for Tableau as well). 

I love the fact that it's got a very intuitive user interface. 

I like the fact that you can create aggregations and view measures and metrics on the fly. 

I like the visuals themselves as all of our customers are moving away from Excel and this gives them a very unique way to have their data represented in a more visual manner with active slicing and dicing data right there, with the time dimensions and different dimensions. 

I also like the automatic refresh mechanism that it can do. You can have the data refresh automatically every 30 minutes, for example.

The initial setup is pretty simple. 

The stability has been pretty good.

The solution can scale.

Technical support has been great.

Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now.

When you're building, the documentation sucks. It's a painful experience to find out how to do things inside the connector framework. 

I don't like the fact that they need to have a premium excuse to manage larger sets of data. On top of that, there are limitations in building a custom connector. If you want to build a custom connector for your customers, the navigation is flawed. For example, when I build a custom connector to talk to Power BI and report, I want some contextual data of the report, and I want to have what we call incremental refresh. However, incremental refresh right now is only supported in a SQL-based backend. It's not supported for API-based connectors. That's something that we really, really want. We only try to work around it.

Basically, I would love to see that incremental refresh with API-based connectors. I'd also want the report-based contextual information available inside the connector.

The licensing is very confusing.

I've been using the solution since about 2014. I've used it for many years at this point.

We've found the stability to be fine so far. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's easy to scale if you have the premium model. We just started exploring that right now.

The clients we have that use it are medium-sized businesses. These are basically soccer clubs or sports clubs, who are internally using it. however, we want to give it to a larger audience. We haven't gone there yet, though likely we will in the future.

Technical support has been awesome. they are helpful and responsive and we are more than satisfied with the level of service we receive from them.

I also use Tableau. I've used Power BI to a larger extent than Tableau, however, we have a startup in which we have an audience on BI and we are doing research to see how many of them are on Tableau versus Power BI.

We didn't previously use a different solution. We started with Power BI because that was one of our device partner's tools of choice. However, we are trying to support Tableau and Power BI now.

The setup was pretty straightforward. I mean the setup for the Power BI Desktop. The download is pretty straightforward. Once you get to do more complex things with it, using the gateway and things like that, then it gets a little complex. On top of that, the documentation is difficult. It's there, however, it's difficult to find.

The licensing is a little convoluted, and not easy to take advantage of. You're able to scale it in the premium model. However, they are very different versions. There's a difficulty in understanding which one of them applies to you and what the costs would be eventually, and what the performance and thresholds are for each one. The documentation might be there, however, for a small company, in order to find out all the aspects of licensing it's not that easy.

We've also evaluated Tableau and we use both right now.

We are in the startup program for Microsoft.

I'm on the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

It's deployed on the cloud for automatic refreshment service and it's got a gateway on-prem.

It's a very good tool to quickly get started and it does scale, however, as you get into the larger deployments and at a larger scale, it's better to involve a Power BI expert or a partner to help you get there.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. There's room for improvement from the setup and scale perspective.

On-premises

We are power industry consultants and we collect line operation data from power plants, preprocess it and then put it into some visualization software such as Tabula or Power BI. We then generate a regular test report for our customers who are power plant operators. 

It provides good visibility to the customer. They can see everything that's going on in a logical and user-friendly way. 

If you create too many pages, things can get heavy and slow down significantly. Once you create the dashboard, the data is updated at certain time intervals. I'd like to see more flexibility around those time options. It's difficult to easily share the dashboard with people outside the organization. 

I've used this solution for two years. 

The Microsoft support is not very good. When issues arise, I use Google or the user discussion boards. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward, it's just a matter of downloading the software from Microsoft and installing it. 

The solution is very affordable. 

The big difference between Tableau and Microsoft BI is the price tag which is much higher for Tableau. Tableau also provides a server for web publishing. It means you can easily share the visualization with people outside your company. In that sense, Power BI is more difficult. I also think Tableau may be more secure. 

I would recommend this solution if you're a smaller organization. If you have massive data, like a corporation, then Tableau is probably the product to use. 
I rate this solution six out of 10. 

We are a solution provider and Microsoft BI is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is used for customized dashboarding, reporting, and self-serve analytics, on a broad scale in enterprise.

The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do. People with limited experience in terms of coding can implement this themselves. If an organization doesn't have a high amount of skill, internally, then it's something that they can still spin up themselves, relatively well.

It could be changed to the point where it's more suited for self-serve analytics.

The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors.

I have been selling and using Microsoft BI for approximately two years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution.

This product is scalable.

We have dozens of customers that use it.

The Microsoft technical support is not great. You need to have a partner in place that's able to handle these services for you. Customers aren't going to get answers quick enough if they're going directly to the vendor.

I have experience with a couple of other similar products but I'd only downloaded the free versions of these tools to play around with. One of these is Tableau.

Tableau is a solution that would be used more at the enterprise scale. It may be more suitable for analytics. 

These days, from a visual perspective in terms of analytics, dashboards, and customized dashboards, I tend to use Google products.

The complexity of the installation depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing anything relatively complex, such as working with AI or machine learning, then you would probably want to have a specialist service provider do it for you.

We've seen that people are tending to use solutions that compete with it, just because they are easier to automate. From a large-scale point of view, the installation could be simpler.

That said, in its simplest form, it can be used for self-serve analytics.

A company can handle the deployment and maintenance in-house on its own. Or, if they're doing a large-scale project, they might be in need of two engineers.

My customers pay a yearly licensing fee.

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.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

We are a consultant company so we use the many tools, just for our customers. However, we have professional services on, for example, Microsoft Power BI.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is cloud-native. 

It works well with Microsoft products. 

The licensing is very simple.

We find the solution offers good stability.

You can scale the solution if you need to. 

Technical support has always been helpful and responsive.

Pricing is quite reasonable.

They should improve the connector to on-premises data. Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources. You have a gateway. It's not very easy.

The solution offers good stability. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it's not a problem.

We use a couple of professionals from Microsoft directly for our clients, and we are really satisfied with them.

We use SAS BI and Microsoft BI. I prefer Microsoft BI as, from a licensing point of view, it's easier as it's a per-user licensing. If Power BI is the right tool for companies, it's a shorter time-to-market approach to business intelligence.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company should have no issue with the process. 

We find the licensing to be very straightforward. It's easier to understand than other options on the market. 

The pricing is fairly inexpensive. It's not a costly solution.

We have a business relationship with Microsoft. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner for cloud products. In the past, we've used a lot of Microsoft products and also some of our clients have used them directly.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'd advise that new users should take care of the technical architecture in order to connect in the right way to the data sources to extract data.

Public Cloud

We are using Microsoft BI to do analytics for tax and customs administration at the centralized level, in order to fight fiscal fraud and detect tax evasion

Microsoft BI has helped the creation of a powerful analytical tool able to detect inconsistencies in different customs and tax declarations/returns and thus allow the Tax Administration to have a full taxpayer view from the fiscal point of view. It finally leads to increasing the collected revenues by cross-checking data coming from different governmental sources.

Microsoft BI was choosen among different proposed solution due to the fact that there was a local knowledge by the staff. Its integration with other Microsoft products used by the administration was also taken into account as being easy. The "already seen" effect was ensuring the staff trust; precious when making a big organisational change : we have observed that staff was more confident to stick to something they have already seen in the past rather that a totally revolutionary approach. The self-service tool is much appreciated.

Not yet assessed. A final assessement will be realized once the system has achieved 1 year of operational results.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately six months

The solution is stable. we did not yet had any issue.

We have not scaled the solution much. However, we will extend next year the number of users we currently have to 300. At the moment we're only working with a restricted number of users. We will also extend the number of sources of data.

I have not needed to contact technical support.

The initial IT setup was easy, It took two months for the full deployment to complete. It was fairly quick. From the business point of view, of course, the deployment as envisaged with the different data sources and capabilities will take around 18 months.

We used an integrator for the implementation and they were great. They did a good job. We have approximately three people for the maintenance and support of the solution at the IT level and 20 people using it from Business point of view, with potential increase up to 150.

We expect a dramatic increase of collected revenues once the full solution is in place. The ROI should be at break even in less than two - three years of full exploiting the solution.

We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft concerning the license which decreased the cost of the licenses for Microsoft BI. I have found it to be cheaper than other solutions. It is always difficult to compare the Total Cost of Ownership, mainly because most of the big companies do have a very blur licensing system. The most open one seems to be Tableau.

We have evaluated and completed a market analysis of Oracle and Tableau before choosing Microsoft BI. Oracle because already being used for the internal databases; Tableau because its facility of development and deployment.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to have the use cases well prepared in advance. Additionally, it is important to know exactly what type of analytics, dashboards, and reports they want, we spend a lot of time with this. I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten

On-premises