Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I lead the data visualization competency. As a competency leader, my responsibility is to make people grow in this technology. It could be Power BI, Tableau, or QlikView. We are service-oriented, and depending upon the demand, we have to have experienced people and a resource pool ready in these areas. Depending upon the requirement, I decide how many people need to be trained or hired.

Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python. 

It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it.

I have been using this solution for close to two years.

We found no issues. It is an aggregated reporting tool. It cannot handle a detailed level of data. It is meant only for the dashboarding purpose. You need to have your underlying data in an aggregated way, and then it would be faster. It depends on whether you have a live connection or you don't have a live connection.

We don't see many issues, but whenever we put a request, they at least respond.

I have worked on Tableau. Before Tableau, I have worked with traditional tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects. My team has got experience with Spotfire, but we are not seeing a great demand for Spotfire.

If you ask me for the top three, I would qualify Power BI, then Tableau, and then QlikView. That's the demand that I'm seeing in the market from various customers.

I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView.

My first advice is to learn SQL. The foundational knowledge and SQL skills are the most important. You have to be very strong in writing SQL code. You have to improve your mind so that you know what you are writing in Power BI. After that, it is very easy to pick up any front-end reporting tool, such as Power BI or Tableau. After you have good expertise in Power BI, you can slowly learn Python so that you can do good integration. All these efforts would be great for your career.

Being a gold partner of Microsoft for the past few years, we work directly with Microsoft product teams. Sometimes as part of a pre-launch, they also connect with us. If we see a feature or functionality that a client requires, we at least put it across to them. How they prioritize it within their product team is up to them. They prioritize depending on the need of the market and demand from various clients, and they release features accordingly. Sometimes, we also work on a pre-release.

They release new features and functionalities every month. They have also recently released data protection smart narratives. If you look at the Gartner report, they are leading. I see a lot of demand for this solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

• Enterprise reporting
• Enterprise BI
• Project reporting and BI
• Data integration
• Data collection
• Information management

• We are running over 500,000 report annually.
• It provides data feeds for enterprise KPI reporting.
• It provides data feeds for AI.

• Integration of DB and reporting
• Standardised SQL language
• Plenty of support
• Cloud options
• Continual improvement year-over-year

• The data source definition is all over the place. 
• It needs a wizard that covers all its options. 
• It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections.

SSRS and the Tabular server/Vertipaq engine/DAX are probably the two most valuable components, leaving out SQL Server (and Azure versions of it, including the Azure warehouse and big data technologies). SSRS's display functionality is resoundingly flexible, and by comparison to other vendors, relatively easy to learn. SSAS Tabular performs very well with modest effort in design, and the ability to perform complex business modeling through DAX calculations stands out in a crowd.

Microsoft BI really entails a whole catalog of products. The relative ease with which these products work together is where the primary value comes into play. When you buy SQL Server Enterprise, you automatically have access to SSAS, which can handle Tabular or multidimensional cubes and data mining, SSIS offering a pretty comprehensive integration toolset, SSRS, covering just about any paginated and subscription-based reporting, and of course all of the in-built features of SQL Server, the individual useful features of which there are too many to spout out here. Each of these components work well enough in isolation, or as part of a larger ecosystem with other vendors, but together are a well-integrated machine that can handle end-to-end needs on the entire lifecycle of data. Being one of the more popular vendors, Microsoft products are also the first compatibility for other vendors' products. The breadth of products do a fine job at enabling the delivery of data and insights to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. Doing so efficiently/quickly is where a huge amount of value comes in. Many other enterprise vendors are capable, but are either slower to execute, more work to maintain, cost much more to find talent and skills for, or some combination of all of the above.

No product is perfect, and the Microsoft stack is no exception. The first things that come to mind are Microsoft's recent shift in strategy to focus on cloud first. While this makes sense for them, it leaves the on-premise products lagging in support and new features, while the vast majority of users (mid to large corporations) are still using on-premise solutions and/or are cloud-averse. For example, the announcement that the pricing model for Power BI would change, simultaneously rolling out both Power BI Premium and Power BI Report Server created a great deal of confusion for people who were very enthusiastic about the product. The failures to address concerns with the speed and nature of the changes were felt by users across the spectrum, and it was a situation created by their cloud-first strategy. Similarly, if you look at the tried and true on-premise options for data processing, interfacing with emerging technologies, especially big data technologies, lags behind. This is considerably less true for Azure users, but that is specifically a cloud offering, which again, many corporate entities are not yet ready to embrace.

It's easy to think of BI as only the visualization aspect of data, and that point of contact between users and data is absolutely where the rubber meets the road in BI. In reality, there are a whole stack of tools and concepts behind the visualization that enable that interaction - from security, data governance, integration, performance, network and infrastructure, and automation... there are many facets to BI as a system. The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack. The PowerBI visualization experience is underwhelming in almost every way compared to many alternatives.

Another difficulty is navigating the many products within the suite. There are many components, and each component has many versions. Dealing with feature and compatibility issues with so many versions of so many products can be very frustrating at times. Microsoft does not do itself any favors on this front with the way they name their products. "PowerBI", for example, could be in reference to the desktop design tool, a cloud-based service for publishing and administering data models (which comes with three distinctively different pricing models, the features of which are different and not interchangable), or an on-premise server solution replacing SSRS. You'll make yourself dizzy looking at the Azure services offered. The good news is the sky's the limit, the bad news is you'll have to navigate some pretty cloudy areas to make heads or tales of what to actually use.

Four years, using largely SQL Server 2012 and related versions/components.

In general, no. Most stability issues encountered have been more related to network or infrastructure, and not the products being used.

As with any system, good design is paramount. I have certainly run into times when performance suffers, or changes and enhancements are slow and expensive. In every case, redesign has solved the issues. As hardware improves, and the many options (especially in the Azure and big data space) continue to evolve, designing for scale has become easier and easier. One of the difficulties that naturally occurs in this ecosystem is simply knowing how to design with so many options that can potentially do the same or similar task.

I have experienced mixed results on this front. We have had some very available and supportive account reps at times, and other times not so much. My biggest complaint would have to be that the disorganization from Microsoft's side makes the results on this front inconsistent.

Depends on which components we are talking about. For reference, however, I don't think there is a single Microsoft component that was as painful as any given Oracle component to work with.

Do your homework when deciding what components to leverage. The worst thing you can do is try to use them all. The gamut of products under the Microsoft BI banner enables every form of BI - choose the ones that serve your specific purposes, and leave the rest on the table until a new need arises.

• SQL Server Integration Services
• SQL Server Management Studio

There have been occasions when a certain application would work very slowly on other DB platforms and once we migrated to SQL Server the response times improved dramatically. For example, I recently migrated an application from TeraData to SQL Server and the response times for some functions were cut down from 90 seconds to about less than 1 second! This obviously speeds up the work that gets done within a day.

The SQL Server Reporting Services can certainly use some more help. Within SSIS, I see room for more connectors and easier debug messages that would speed up the process of development. The biggest hurdle that any developer comes across is vague error messages.

About eight to nine years.

No. The installation and deployment process has always been smooth and simple.

No. Product is very robust and reliable.

Adding extra machines to the cluster environment is not difficult but certainly needs experienced developers/implementers to do that.

Excellent. They usually turn around within good time and you can also request new features directly from the group that is responsible for the product.

9/10

A different solution was not used previously.

I have been to many projects and usually the setup is pretty straight forward. But even when it comes to complicated setups such as multiple clusters, the product still seems easy once understood.

In-house implementation.

It varies from place to place. But a typical license would cost anywhere from a few thousand bucks to the upper $20k-$30k range.

• MicroStrategy
• TeraData
• Informatica.

Look at the amount of data that you have and the amount you anticipate in the future. If you have multiple sources of data and multiple applications consuming it, sticking to a single solution might not be the best idea.

I use Power BI primarily for generating reports, analyzing data, and supporting data-driven decisions across various functions within the organization.

The solution's data integration capabilities are beneficial because they allow us to seamlessly integrate data from multiple sources, simplifying the analysis process and providing a comprehensive view for better decision-making.

There is room for improvement in terms of customization and configuration options, particularly for more advanced users.

I have been using Power BI for quite some time now.

The product is scalable. Expanding its use across different teams within the organization has been relatively easy.

We are seeing a good return on investment with Power BI, particularly in terms of how it has streamlined our reporting and analytics.

The solution's costs are quite reasonable given the range of features provided.

We receive real-time reporting with Power BI, which greatly impacts our decision-making process by allowing us to respond more quickly to changes in the data.

The data visualization tools particularly strong. The ability to create custom dashboards and reports tailored to different

It is highly user-friendly and cost-effective. However, it may lack certain advanced features present in other solutions.

Overall, I rate it a seven out of ten. 

We've used Microsoft BI for the general use cases around reporting and dashboarding. We used it once for Power Apps to develop a live application.

Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved.

I have been using Microsoft BI for four years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution.

Between Microsoft BI and Tableau, I would go for Tableau because it's more powerful. Tableau could connect to a variety of databases, and the visualization is much, much better. I would always prefer Tableau because of the dimension picking you could do there. Speed-wise, the latency issues were much lesser in Tableau.

If you're using Azure in general as a cloud service provider, Power BI would be more integrative. If you need a stand-alone system and are not worried about the cloud setup, I recommend using Tableau.

Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it.

Overall, I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

The solution is very powerful and very flexible. 

It is very easy to set up and you can connect it to multiple systems very easily.

They keep on upgrading, performance-wise. 

Power BI is very fast; they have improved Power BI a lot in general over time. YOu can see the difference. 

The stability is great and continues to get better and better.

The pricing is pretty good.

They should provide some kind of extra visual. There are a lot of third-party companies that provide these visuals, however, it would be better if, instead of relying on a third party, they could have their own. We should have by default in the package itself, some good visuals.

Technical support could be a bit better.

The performance could be enhanced in the sense that there is a limitation of the volume of data that it can hold. 

While they have some different options out there, they did not improve anything when you connect to any dataset, when you have to import. You need to connect online, meaning live.  

You cannot create so many things on the Power BI side, such as adding a new column, which is not possible in your live reporting, direct query option. In contrast, with the import method, you can do so many things. They need to improve on the direct query option side.

The product is stable. I have seen a lot of improvements in the stability of their application lately. If you compare what's available now to the last three to four years back, you can see it's more stable.

It's scalable and it scales quickly. Nowadays, being on the cloud, expanding is very easy.

While support is okay, they need to improve it a lot. Of course, they're improving as we speak, yet, I would say, if you can ask me the ratings, I would still say it's still rather low and good - not great.

I'm also familiar with SAP, which doesn't scale as well. SAP also is much more expensive. SAP is a big product, whereas Microsoft BI is much smaller. They only overlap in terms of the analytics cloud and the SAP goes above and beyond and offers many, many more things. 

The pricing is fair. They give you many options by splitting up the licensing. They have multiple types of licenses out there based on your usage. You can increase your pricing if you use it a bit more, however, it's still quite reasonable as compared to SAP. 

We are a customer and end-user. We are not a Microsoft (or SAP) partner.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We are using Microsoft BI to generate point of sale reports.

The solution overall is very useful. The reports that are generated and the reporting functionality management are beneficial.

We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately six years.

Microsoft BI is highly stable.

The performance depends on the requirement. You have to complete your requirement which is a priority. After that, you understand your requirement and the performance could be better. The performance is the second.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable.

The installation difficulty depends on the integration, once integrated properly you can receive results. Microsoft BI can be very helpful to your business.

The implementation took us 15 to 20 days.

We use two Microsoft consultants to do the implementation of the solution.

I have evaluated other solutions.

I rate Microsoft BI a five out of ten.

If I compare Microsoft BI with other solutions, other solutions are much better, but because we have already invested in Microsoft BI. We are using this and maybe in one or two years, we will use something else. We will finalize the testing of other solutions and implement one of them.