Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I have started a consulting business. So my use case is typically what my clients are doing. I've used it for healthcare analysis, headcount analysis, financial and performance analysis.

One thing it's doing in the early stage of an implementation is, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected.

The ability for business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person.

One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes.

It's not only stable but it's constantly improving. 

The scaling is dependent on the data source itself, so it's not dependent on the solution. SQL Server, which is one of the strongest enterprise databases, makes that a good thing.

We were previously using Excel, and Excel did not have the ability to deploy nor did it have the ability to easily do some of the things that people were asking for. The switch was driven by being overwhelmed in the Excel world.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• the ability to develop solutions in an agile fashion
• the ability to have power users on the business side able to do their own work.

It's very, very easy to get started. The complexity is the typical complexity in deployment, in that you have to have people make decisions on who has rights to what data. As far as the implementation, it's quite easy.

Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper.

The short list was really only Tableau and Microsoft, and frequently clients have Microsoft products already installed so they have the security, the Active Directory, as well as the use of Excel, and the use of the collaboration tools like O365.

I'd say that Microsoft and Tableau are both nine and a half out of 10, and it's per the requirements I already mentioned. They both are very high-quality, easy to use, stable, they both allow business users to do a level of development, and they're both highly deployable.

My advice to a colleague would be that they actually do short trials with each of the products they're considering and the check the vendors' support.

We use Microsoft Power BI to automate dashboards to present information to our senior management. It helps us extract the relevant data from the dashboard.

The product’s most valuable feature is data updates after modifying and refreshing the dashboard. It offers a lot of information and is very flexible and interactive.

The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version. It would be a very useful functionality.

We have been using Microsoft Power BI for about a year and a half.

The product is stable. It works perfectly, and we haven’t encountered any issues working with it.

It is a scalable product. We have around 100 Microsoft Power BI users in our organization. We are expecting growth in the number of users.

We have worked with SAP BusinessObjects. Power BI is better because it has more flexibility and functionalities.

I rate Microsoft Power BI a nine out of ten. I recommend it to users who want to pursue a career in data engineering. It will be very helpful and provides a lot of guides on the Internet, especially on YouTube. They can gain knowledge about its advantages and disadvantages.

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.

We have both deployments for Microsoft BI, cloud, and the on-premise.

We are using SAP BI and Microsoft BI to augment the other.

Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs.

In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility.

When you create tables in Microsoft BI, you have to create them separately. I can't have several reports packed together in one document, whereby I can have different tabs. You could have several pages of your dashboard, such as a summary page with all the detail. However, in the paginated reports, you don't have that kind of flexibility. This is a major area that Microsoft needs to work on.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable. We did an enterprise-wide deployment and every one of the 500 people in the company uses it.

I have not needed to contact Microsoft or the local vendor.

We use SAP BI in parallel to Microsoft BI currently. Our plan is to replace the SAP BI with Power BI. The phase we are in now is to run both of them in parallel and see how everything is operating before we completely phase out SAP BI. The focus isn't on SAP or Power BI. It used to be our SAP BI solution. Since we started using Power BI, the plan is to actually discontinue SAP BI. maybe by next year we will no longer use the SAP BI.

I switched to Microsoft BI from SAP BI because, in my part of the world, it is becoming the most popular BI tool. Additionally, the ease of integration and our organization is a Microsoft shop. Everything is Microsoft, our databases, our ERP, and we use Microsoft dynamics and Business Center. 

The ease of integration of the BI tool is important for our organization. The scalability and then the licensing are good. If you choose the cloud for SAP BI, you have to spend more. The planning modules sometimes do not come with the package and you will need to spend on it.

It is not necessarily that Microsoft BI is better, but because there are other benefits when you consider Microsoft BI. The ease of integration with the DB and the ERP, and then you look at the overall cost.

The initial setup is simple to do.

We did the implementation ourselves. The solution does require maintenance.

The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive.

We pay annually for the license of the solution and we are using a premium license.

The choice of a BI tool is relative. If you have the capacity and the budget, you could decide to use SAP BI. There are other BI tools on the market. Why did we choose Microsoft BI is because of the nature of our business environment, the nature of your data, and many other factors that have to be considered.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of then.

I am a Power BI technical senior developer and consultant and I use Power BI to provide solutions for my clients.

Everything that's in M Query and DAX is the heart of Power BI because with these tools you can make up for a lot of other missing features. When I say "missing features", I mean it in the sense that, even if you don't have a direct feature to do something, there are quite a few workarounds that you can figure out with DAX and M Query to make different situations work. I think these two are really the soul of the tool because they make a lot of impossible things possible.

There's a lot of room for improvement because Power BI is a new tool and hasn't really been in the market for that long, especially considering alternative tools such as MicroStrategy or Tableau which have been around for more than a decade. Because Power BI is younger than those tools, I feel it hasn't reached a certain level of maturity that comes with time and it is lacking in quite a few areas which I'm hoping will be seen to in the future, given how it has been progressing so far with its new releases.

There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another.

When it comes to the feature's functionality, that's all fine, but, say, for instance, that you want to go ahead and turn off only the sub totals and not the grand totals. This might not be immediately possible, especially if you are working in a project where your technical solution is the backend site which the users don't quite care about. What they care about is what they see and interact with, and the visuals and formatting (and visual settings) at hand are what really matter to them.

This is where I think standardization really needs to come in. Basic stuff like being able to selectively turn on or off only the sub totals or grand totals. There should be certain formatting options which should be standard across every visual. What options you get here, you should also get over there, for example. These are simple things, but many a time it's something the end user takes very seriously. They generally do not care about what's happening in the background with regard to the calculations and everything else.

In essence, the standard visualizations should have features and options in common with one another, even when it comes to other visualization tools such as bar charts and line charts. These are all pretty basic visualization features, and giving them some standard way to be customized will make them as capable and competitive as what other tools allow you to do. Of course, you can do this if you add your own custom visuals from the library, but when it comes to basic default stuff, they should at least be deep enough in terms of standard customization to compete.

Right now it seems like they're trying to add a lot of features, but at the expense of losing out on the essence of the basics. The basics in Power BI should be equally as good as the basics in any other tool, and in this case I believe it to be a problem of adding more depth to certain features. The width, and variety, of features is not a problem for me. Whatever features are already available need to be deep enough to work with comfortably, and I feel this is where Microsoft needs to direct its focus.

I have been in the BI world for about six or seven years now and for the last few years it's all been Power BI for me.

Their support is a little slow in the sense that when I post a question to them, I don't get a response as fast as I'd like. Unless you're a premium user and you've got a dedicated technical support team — that's a different thing.

When it comes the usual Microsoft bugs, they generally don't come up with solutions too quickly. And many a time they don't even have a running solution; some bug fixes will probably only be part of the next release. Even then, however, the new releases are themselves often not terribly stable. Whenever you get a new feature, you almost know that this one's not going to work as perfectly as you would want it to. So you just have to wait for the next one, and that's what it is. It takes a little while to stabilize. This kind of thing, along with their support in general, can probably be sped up a little bit.

I am certified in MicroStrategy and have worked with it for several years. However, most of the business I am getting lately is all Power BI.

In my experience, everybody is switching from either MicroStrategy to Power BI or Tableau to Power BI. I'm hearing and seeing this going on in the market, for some very good reasons. I'm no longer working with MicroStrategy, but not because I don't like it. It's simply that I'm not getting enough work in that area.

Setup is very easy. In Power BI that's one thing you will find across the board when using it. It is very easy in terms of getting something done. Even complex things can be done in a pretty easy way and there's no complex challenge in it.

The pricing is good. It's pretty competitive because I have worked on a few other tools as well, and Power BI is on the cheaper side.

That said, many times people are attracted by its affordable price tag, but then they see that it doesn't do everything they want and they conclude that that was the reason why it was so cheap. There's a problem with this kind of thinking, because even though it might not have everything, the price is still on the cheaper side compared to other analysis products like MicroStrategy. The complete suite of features from MicroStrategy is very costly, but at the same time there's no doubt that it can achieve a lot.

What you get with Power BI is that you start to find that even simple stuff requires a lot of gymnastics to achieve because there's no in-built, straightforward feature for it and you need to come up with a workaround. There are a few too many workarounds needed for my comfort, but otherwise it's a very good tool and it's one of my favorites. The pricing is competitive for a reason.

If you are looking for tabular reporting, then Power BI is not the tool for you. This isn't something that Microsoft speaks much about, and in my experience, if you want to do tabular reporting then there first has to be something in Power BI which can actually take loads of data and print it out on visuals in a tabular way, which is currently lacking. Power BI is really designed for analytical dashboarding and that's what it does best. For tabular reporting, on the other hand, it's better to just get the data exported out into Excel and do the rest there.

I would rate Microsoft PowerBI a seven out of ten.

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.

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.