Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The ease of implementation and reliability of SQL Server Reporting Services far exceeded the solution originally implemented with Crystal Report. The Crystal Report Servers (3 of them) were crashing on a weekly basis at one of the companies where I worked.

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 time it took to run some reports in Crystal were exceeding 5 minutes. The same report in SSRS not only was significantly faster (down to 30 seconds) and the licensing cost savings allowed for a quicker return on investment (less than one year).

The build in Report Builder for end users needs improvement. But for someone that has some training on SSRS, its very straightforward.

The solution was implemented and still in use to this day to my knowledge.

No. Following the installation guide was a help with setting up SSRS to use single sign on as well as SQL accounts. The overall setup of the server took about an hour. The conversion of over 200 Crystal Reports to SSRS took some more time but was done with one user and completed within 3 months.

No. SSRS has been rock solid and the server never needed rebooting unlike the Crystal Report Servers.

No. In fact we were able to decommission servers and switch to using a virtual server for SSRS.

Customer Service:

Never had to use their support. But, the few times I have had to contact Microsoft, there were very knowledgeable and able to resolve the problem quickly.

Technical Support:

9, see above.

Yes. We used Crystal Reports, see above.

We're using it for sales information and production information. Pushing a report into Power BI makes it easier to use and a little bit more powerful.

We're using the most recent version of the solution.

The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it.

We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses.

We've had Microsoft BI for about two years, and we are using it currently. It's a part of Microsoft Teams.

It's stable. 

I don't know if it's scalable to the point that we want it. It seems to fit where we have it. We haven't really looked at its scalability. We have other tools, but it works well for what it's doing today.

There are roughly half a dozen users of this solution, and it has sales-related information. There is one driver, and she merges the information. So, there aren't too many rules at this point.

We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time.

It has been good.

That would've been Excel. So, it isn't a switch; it is growth.

It was easy. We had a good understanding of being able to map two programs together. We had a little training, but otherwise, it was good.

The program installation took a few days, but it took weeks to make the intelligence and the company information look right.

We did it ourselves. We had an individual who worked with it in the past. She picked it up very quickly because she was already trained.

We don't need anybody specific for its maintenance.

We didn't evaluate any other options. The use of Power BI just came with the program, and we installed it. We weren't looking for something different. It just was there for us to use.

My advice to others who are looking into implementing this product is that it is important that they understand their information. They have to understand how the program works, but they also have to understand their information for it to work better.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

On-premises

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

I'm using the desktop version and collaborating within our company.

As a training company we wish to analyze the instructions as they relate to our customers. Also, we take certain examples for our classrooms, our training.

I consider the solution to be quite good. In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results. It's more intuitive and it is better for understanding the whole process without much code. We're only using the user interface, not writing code.

We find it to be easier and it provides a better understanding of the results, both for us and our customers.

I cannot think of anything needing improvement at present and am quite satisfied with what we have, This said, I would like to see integration with Excel. This is because many of our customers like to have their results appear not only on a dashboard, but also in Excel, as they use it extensively. They would approve of the integration. 

Also, there should be greater functionality from Power BI for the performance of certain complex tasks. Many things are being done with the interface and if we'll want automation to play a role then we will need more flexible programming, such as we have with Data Expressions. The interface must be utilized for carrying out more complex tasks. We wish to automate this using software and programming language. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for one or two years. 

I feel the technical support to be fine. We have all the support that we need.

Having a proper understanding of how the data is modeled poses the greatest challenge. However, someone who has this should find the installation to be quite straightforward. The initial step involves having an understanding of the data model. 

I think the setup is quite easy and straightforward. The solution can simply be downloaded  and used. The most difficult thing involves the distillation of SQL Server, not what relates to Power BI.

From our side we have around 20 people who are responsible for the deployment and maintenance, although I include in this figure not only the technical but all of the administrative staff. We have the trainers and also the people who are working with the technical support to deliver the training.

The cost of the solution is more flexible for us because the desktop is free and we pay as we use it in the cloud.

The customers have licenses of their own. We use their installations to help them with their work. Usually, these people represent new entries into the company and we give them the initial experience to start working with the software.

As I could tell, I feel the solution to be easy. It is very good that all the users, as they use MS SQL, have a product from the same company. It is an overall experience for them to use Power BI.

We are an end-user and a partner to the vendor. We do training and provide consultations to our customers. 

We work with companies, around eight in total, and we deal with their employees. Overall, we are talking about approximately 300 people. We give training to the employees of these companies and also provide consultations. 

I strongly recommend the solution because I think it's a very modern tool and quite easy for all the data analysts and programmers.

I believe that all of the people who we have mentioned so far are quite satisfied with the solution.

I rate Microsoft BI as a nine out of ten. 

On-premises

Our primary use case is to learn what Power BI can do. We also use it to create dashboards and to see what is available for people to use. We see how it integrates with Excel. You can easily get the data into a visualization but also still have access to the underlying data.  

We use it see how we can move away from an Excel spreadsheet but still give the users the correct answers to the questions that they have. I want to move away looking and fixing issues on particular lines and be able to easily answer the questions with visualizations so users can answer the questions a lot quicker and adapt to changes easier.  

I was self-learning it, we don't use it in our organization. We are looking to use it though in the future. We use a different tool and want to see if we can get more questions answered with Power BI. It's linked to Office 365 and Azure, so it would help us to answer some difficult questions and help identify issues/problems so we can find solutions and adapt the model a lot quicker. Going through over 100,000 lines of data takes too long and we need to be able to group the data more to be able to identify what works better, so a pie chart or map will help to identify issues that are not working. 

The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on. But I need a way to work on getting the data showing correctly and be able to drill down into a worksheet like Excel, as people like to know what the top-level information means. It's important to be open and show them what they want. The number of visualizations is great. So many different options to choose from like heat maps to pie charts.

I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports. We want to condense some reports, so they work for all departments, and not have a version for every single department. Also, I would like to have formulas easier to complete and create. Having its own system means something new to learn, although saying that, it's not hard to pick up this information. 

I have been using Microsoft BI for six months.  

Microstrategy, and no, we have not swapped yet. I use both to keep on top of my own skill set. 

It depends on what you are wanting to do. Get the cost of users, and the servers, and work out if you are hosting, or if it's going into the cloud. 

We didn't as it's a company decision to look to change the BI system. 

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

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 use Microsoft Power BI for production testing. We're not using it for production automation. It's being used for testing and testing themes. We have a testing requirement, so we want to mimic automated workflows on production to be validated on regular intervals, and this is how we use this solution.

One valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's user-friendly. It also has good connectivity between multiple source systems. It's also a good data analysis tool.

The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. This is what Microsoft can work on. They should make the graphs more user-friendly, because other parts of Microsoft Power BI are user-friendly, but the graphical representations aren't.

We've been dealing with Microsoft Power BI for five to ten years now. We were early adopters of cloud solutions, e.g. AWS and Azure, which we adopted from the start. We are a complete cloud company.

Microsoft Power BI is a stable solution.

I find Microsoft Power BI scalable.

It's very easy to deploy Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft Power BI has reasonable pricing.

We evaluated Microsoft Azure.

We use Microsoft Power BI. We also use AWS, but what we primarily use is Microsoft Power BI.

We're using a combination of deployment models for this solution, because the model will depend on the customer need.

We don't procure this solution and other Microsoft tools for ourselves. It's the customer who procures them, and there is not much issues for us to contact support. We are a Microsoft company, e.g. we are partners with Microsoft, so we have good rapport with them.

We recommend Microsoft Power BI even for large enterprises. It's a tool that could be used even by smaller enterprises and by end customers.

My rating for Microsoft Power BI is an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

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

On-premises