Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use this for data analysis and the creation of indicators. It is one of the most powerful tools for BI in my experience. It works very fast, is intuitive, and useful. You just drag and drop, as soon as you download it.

This solution works very well for updating indicator boards, and for quick visualizations in demos. You can present results in many ways to improve the presentation.

I have used it on a variety of applications where it is important to show analysis and present information in a graphical perspective, and also to modify and present information to developers and executives.

One of the features I really like is that there are a lot of different graphics that are very nicely presented. The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI.

When you start, right from the beginning it can help you. Once you upload the data you can start to play with the different options you have from the graphics available, and also from the different mathematical and logical conversions that it offers.

I also work with other data processors and the facilities that Power BI offer can help to better understand the traditional database tools such as SQL, or others.

Another advantage is that you don't have to have a lot of knowledge about databases. This is because you use Power BI knowing your goal and what you want to achieve with respect to the data that you are processing.

I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences. Also, I would like more ease in connecting with the different database drives.

This is different from other solutions in that Power BI offers ease of use. It is different from any SQL tool because you can use it right away.

If you are looking for free tools to process data in different ways for an easy to medium analysis then you have the free version available. However, if you want a complex analysis from multiple sources of data then you should look for the charge and support version.

In my opinion, both options are good.

I evaluated some other tools but I think they had very different objectives. Power BI looked more generic and has an easy and quick way to present the information in different forms.

It is important to say that the information cannot be confidential or secret. This is because the platform processes all data from the Microsoft cloud and you have to be certain of the security issues that someone could face if a security breach happens.

I very much recommend the free trial mode.

Microsoft BI's initial setup is very straightforward.

The solution's documentation needs improvement. It is always a challenge to connect any data that Microsoft needs to read. I'm not able to find out. The solution's visuals and themes are really poor and should be improved.

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

The performance of Microsoft BI is very poor because whenever the reports are published, data never comes in the first place when the site is open. It takes a long time to load, and the access level restriction is not as easy as it is in Tableau.

More than 5,000 people are using Microsoft BI in our organization.

I previously used the Tableau solution.

Microsoft BI's deployment takes hardly 10 to 15 minutes or less than that. I had to just download and install the solution, as it was a desktop version.

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

The IT department has dashboards for reporting to the higher levels of management.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid model: cloud-based and on-premise. We always get the latest version because we have the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

We encourage end users to use Power BI because it's quite easy for them to interact with the menus and the navigation bar. Even for ordinary users, they can create their own dashboard using Power BI.

There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users. These improvements wouldn't be too technical.

I have been using Microsoft BI for a very long time—since it was first released.

The solution is stable enough, but I think Tableau has a better interactive UX and user experience. We are not using Tableau right now.

We have tens of thousands of users, and we are willing to increase the number of users.

Support is amazing.

I have experience with Tableau.

The license is on a yearly basis.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. I would recommend this solution for others. 

We don't have any other solution out there right now, so I would say we are satisfied with it. There are some disadvantages, some weaknesses of Microsoft Power BI that we have addressed to the Microsoft team.

The IT department has a good relationship with the Microsoft team, so they always give input to Microsoft's department teams.

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.

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.