Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Since we are a consulting company, our cases vary from customer to customer and from department to department, but mainly we have found two "standard" cases: Business users connecting to a DWH, or trying to consolidate several Excel workbooks to create business dashboards.

In the DWH cases, it is simpler since most of the data transformations and modeling are done by IT, but in the 'spreadsheet world', it becomes more complicated.

Users try to move from a huge table filled with numbers and "color-coded" cells to data visualizations, sometimes not even knowing how to write a simple Excel expression.

The biggest improvement comes from a "do it once, refresh many" concept. The users used to perform a lot of massaging on the data itself prior to the analysis phase. Now, they build their reports and refresh the data, so they have a lot more time to perform analysis, which is the real added value to the business.

Unlike other tools (like Tableau), getting to this point took a lot of resources in training, but when the users got there, it is a real time saver for them, allowing them to focus more on analysis, not on data manipulation.

I like the downloadable visualizations a lot. I think that they give the user a very nice starting point in creating awesome dashboards, with the right way to tell their data story.

Data Modeling is very simple and powerful for an experienced user, but I think it needs some improvement for the non-technical people. Besides this, it allows us to save a lot of time in data "massaging" prior to the analysis phase.

Reports are quite easy to build, even when some programming concepts are needed. Some users struggle with DAX a lot!

I think Power BI needs to focus more on the end-user (i.e. the business user). Solving things in DAX is not a nice approach to a user that has no knowledge of IT nor wants to get it.

Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product.

I see a lot of materials on how to go about doing things in Power BI, but Microsoft can add a "learning path". It would instruct users where to start, then what to learn next, etc, to sort out their learning journey.

I have been using Microsoft BI for ~four years.

I am using the solution for data analytics.

I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs. As for now, I am able to do a lot of operations but not with much proficiency. I am just getting started with it. I am not very good at doing dashboard creation or writing reports but sometimes I do it during office hours to understand and learn the analytical tools.

I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

I am only working with small datasets at the moment and the solution has been stable. I am not sure how it will be for larger datasets. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in my organization.

This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license.

This solution is a useful tool for the business and experts. It has plenty of features. I do not have a lot of advice because I am just starting to explore the solution but I have found it very helpful in terms of data presentation. 

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

It is mostly used for monthly cost reports for our department. We are also using it as a dashboard for giving some overview for management purposes. We are using the latest version.

Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable.

They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. 

They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use.

I have been using Microsoft BI for almost two and a half years.

Stability is quite good as long as you have proper sizing from the beginnings. If you do the right sizing keeping in mind the current usage as well as future growth, it is good.

It is scalable. We have around 65 seniors managers who use it on a weekly or monthly basis. Some reports are done weekly and some monthly.

I have not contacted them so far. I am from the user side. We contact our centralized IT department for any issues. If they have a technical issue that requires further escalation, they will directly contact Microsoft technical support.

The initial setup is quite simple, but for the product use, you need to have people who have got experience of at least three to six months in using these applications. It took us two months to deploy across the company.

We have a core team that gets training from a Microsoft partner. We then deploy it ourselves. After six months of using this solution, some of the key users get advanced training. 

We also maintain it ourselves. We have around ten people for its maintenance.

It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear.

We reviewed some other intelligence tools, and we just used them for trials.

I would recommend this solution, especially for the companies that mostly use Microsoft products and ecosystem. I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

I primarily use this for creating dashboards and reports for the oil and gas industry.

Power BI is always updating. I receive multi mail from Power BI with new visualizations, new analytics, new webinars and I'm going to Microsoft here locally in order to have a updated presentation about the new features of Power BI. For me it's very versatile. I can publish on my iPad. I have a Power BI application in order to manage the visualization of my report and my dashboard. Also I can speak to Power BI and ask about production and Q&A. But, I don't have compilation with other tools yet. For me, Power BI is the best.

I would like to see a feature that connects with a Machine Learning platform like a RapidMiner or Azure Machine Learning Studio. It would be great to have a Machine Learning application link to connect. 

It was straightforward. We had no problems with implementation.

The pricing is fine for our company. It is reasonably priced.

Because this solution is very easy, and very visual, you can have results in minutes. 

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 the product for some data tasks such as data binding and reporting. That's it.

The customization and management are very easy. 

We have found that the reporting and publishing are great. Sometimes people like to use the report for their teams.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The solution is scalable.

It's reliable and the performance has been good.

The cost of the product is not too high.

You need to purchase upgraded support separately.

The marketing will need to increase more now. Power BI is a good product, however, from Microsoft, and I'm not getting too much marketing information about new features or anything like that. People don't know the capabilities and they really should.

We find the solution to be stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable.

The product can scale. It's not an issue.

You do need to purchases specific support in order to get a good amount of attention. If you are a company that needs 24/7 support, you need to pay for it.

The basic support is good, although it is a little slow. 

The Microsoft support model has it set up so that a first call will only get a user to their ambassador. Okay. Their ambassador will not have too much knowledge. They just identify what is the issue then they escalate to their team. Microsoft support could improve their services to attempt to have a first call resolution. Right now, in most cases, the first call resolution is not possible.

We did not use a different solution previously.

Power BI is a fast application. Therefore, the setup is very, very easy. You just license it, sign up, and you can use it.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not overly expensive, although you will need to pay for extra support if you think you will need assistance regularly.

We only looked at Microsoft. We did not consider other options. 

We are Microsoft partners.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I use Microsoft BI for the reports and our displaying the data in different ways. As a project manager, I need to follow the budget and receive confirmation about our projects. We have an SAP database and we follow and check all the budget data of the project including data usage.

What I have found valuable about Microsoft BI is its performance and ease of use. The interface is very simple and it is accessible to everyone. If someone is new to this type of solution it is straightforward to understand.

The solution could improve by having more options to manipulate the views of the data on the dashboards. I sometimes need to make them myself but there should be more customizable with drag-and-drop elements and filters on that data differently than it was designed. There are filters in the design stage but there are times you need something else other than how it was designed. For example, if you did not have some of the information at the time of the design. Having the ability to design, or request the data from the database as an end-user is very important. It would be beneficial to have more autonomy on the design of the requested data. You are not able to change the fields or the request data because it was done in the backend and you are not able to see how that request happened. Sometimes you need to make your own requests or have different requests regarding the data. We do not have access because we are not administrators.

In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

I have found it to be scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 people using the solution in my organization.

I have previously used QlikView and Qlik Sense.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.