Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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.

I use this for its analysis service.

I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it.

Every tool has room for improvement. Microsoft also has a lot of room for improvement. If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users.

I've used this for eight years. I've used this solution within the last 12 months.

This solution is stable. It's a nice solution to have.

This solution is very much scalable.

Technical support is good. It's not really very helpful sometimes, but it is good.

We previously used a different solution for a different location, a different customer. If a customer decides to go for one vendor, they stick to that vendor, so changing a vendor is not an option most of the time.

Initial setup is straightforward, but it depends on the business case. It's straightforward, but sometimes it is complex, but compared to any other tool, the setup for this solution is straightforward.

My experience with them is okay.

I wasn't able to evaluate other options before choosing because it was already chosen by the customer.

Deployment for this solution in our organization is mixed: on-premise and through Microsoft cloud.

If you have a source on the Microsoft side then it's always easier to use one vendor for end-to-end solution. Even if there are some other sources, Microsoft has a big and varied area. Take the reporting ETL analysis as an example, everything's built as part Microsoft. It's always good to have one vendor than multiple vendors.

How long deployment of this solution takes all depends on how much data you have. Sometimes it takes a long time if you have a billion rows of data e.g. it could take hours. It also depends on the architecture. It depends on so many things.

There are a hundred users of this solution in our organization. The real users are customers who require reporting to make business decisions. Mostly the users are business analysts.

This solution is pretty much automated, so no maintenance. For AD, some are there as a team, so they help.

No plans of increasing usage of this solution. Maybe in the future, but not right now.

My advice to other people looking into implementing Power BI is to go for it. It's one tool that has everything, and they should always try to evaluate Microsoft compared to open source. Like in open source, you'll always have a lot of libraries, a lot of different tools that you would be using. It's great to try Microsoft Suite because at the end, you'll only have to deal with one vendor so maintenance will be less.

The lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is to try it out. Don't just rely on the features and promises about the solution. You first try it out, then share your experiences with the customer.

My rating for this solution would be seven or eight out of ten because it has everything in it and I don't see anything missing in it. It is efficient for our needs.

As a consultant, I propose something appropriate for my client companies. Mostly, it's some type of ERP, warehouse management, or BI software. It depends on the size of the companies and their requirements.

Small and medium-sized businesses usually need some operations software to cover all the daily necessities. In most cases, I propose some local or regional software for ERP and warehouse management solutions. But for business intelligence and reporting, I typically go with a Microsoft solution.

Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market.

Power BI is as stable as every other Microsoft product. It depends on the environment and other factors — it's not just Power BI. But it's quite stable, I think. And it's also on a very high level.

Microsoft has a lot of partners that offer support and help you with implementation. So if you have some issues that can't be resolved by one level of support, you can find someone else in the same environment. I would say that from the partner level, Microsoft support is excellent. But, of course, it depends on how much you want to pay for it.

The complexity of the Power BI setup depends on how much integration you need, the number of different databases you have to connect, and whether you're automating the system. However, setup is relatively easy for a standard environment. For reporting alone, it was easy to set up. So it really depends on the complexity of the environment, not on the tool.

Power BI's price is reasonable, especially if you can put it in some bigger package and use it with other products. The value of a solution doesn't just come from its features as a standalone product. The price should also reflect how easy it's to set up, clean data, and integrate with other solutions. So in that regard, I would say Microsoft Power BI's price is appropriate.

I recommend Tableau to customers for some things and Power BI for others. But, overall, you can use Power BI in more ways, it's cheaper, and it has a better pricing model.

I rate Microsoft Power BI nine out of 10. It's widely used and incredibly practical. And it's a little easier to prepare, distribute, and automate reports or connect to databases. Power BI is also useful for warehouse management and data systems in data lakes. It's like a Swiss knife for reporting. So I generally recommend Microsoft Power BI for clients who don't have specific requirements for visualization. Tableau is better in that area. But at the same time, Power BI is also upgrading those features. 

Many of my customers already use Microsoft products like Office 365, so I often propose Microsoft Power BI because it integrates well with all the standard Microsoft business tools. And it's the quickest tool to implement and start using daily. You don't need much training. People can pick up this tool quickly and start using it right away. So I think that's the biggest advantage of Power BI. 

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.

We use Microsoft BI for the visualization of data. We also hope to use it for machine learning as it's very powerful, but at the moment, we are trying to get authorized for reporting and analysis.

It's similar to Excel, but it's much more powerful than Excel. I love the unlimited number of rows that can be processed, the grant server application, and the strong security.

It produces a very nice picture — very nice graph managers that are very attractive.

The way you prepare your reports is very intelligent and intuitive. 

It's very easy to operate and the dashboard is great.

I have been using this solution for a few months now.

Microsoft BI is stable, but I cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project.

The customer support is excellent. We get perfect support and it is regional — not only in our country, but there is also regional representation from Microsoft's so-called architects; they are very good professionals who help us with whatever we require.

Currently, we are in process of implementing this solution on my computer. I installed the Microsoft Power BI desktop application very easily and started my training. I didn't experience any difficulties.

I collected information from several sources and it's been working well — I am happy with this software.

I needed about 15 minutes to install the desktop application. The other portion is web-based, so I haven't gotten to that yet.

Microsoft BI is not very cheap. A premium license costs roughly 5,000 euros a month.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to other interested companies.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a rating of eight.

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. 

The integration tool in Microsoft BI stack is one of the best in terms of understanding and together with the script component can make most data imports pretty simple and accurate. Also, the ease of use of the product.

Prior to using the Microsoft BI stack the organization was using a lot of Access and Excel applications which became cumbersome as the organization grew. These tools helped us to streamline the reports and data integration.

The robustness of the stack could be improved as it fails when we import/extract large amounts of data.

Four and a half years.

No issues encountered.

Yes, when the volume of data is large.

Yes.

Excellent with online social help and customer care from Microsoft.

There is a lot of room for improvement in technical support.

I used other reporting platforms along with the Microsoft BI stack, but never switched.

The initial setup is pretty simple for most starting users.

It was an in house implementation.

Very high, as it is a very cost effective application compared to any BI tools in the market.

It is setup by the organization, so I am not sure about the exact cost and renewal cost.

No, I did not have an opportunity to do any evaluations.

It is a great, cost effective solution if the size of the organization is only medium and easy to use and cost of finding a resource is low.

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.