Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use Power BI for a variety of applications, including retail analytics, sales, and process digitization. Except for time series data, we use it for everything. 

We have both deployment options open, so we have the requirements for both on-prem as well as on the cloud. 

One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably. 

Power BI's drillthrough feature could be improved. I didn't like drillthrough and those options much, but I did like it in MicroStrategy. 

As for additional features, I think Power BI could have better interactive features for the end user and scalable drillthrough options. 

I have one year of experience with Microsoft BI. 

Power BI is stable. I have not used it extensively, but from what I understand from my colleagues, it's stable. 

Power BI is scalable. In my organization, there are probably 400 or 500 companies using this solution. We are probably going to increase our usage. 

I have no idea whether the installation process was straightforward or not, on the admin side. As for the technical team required for deployment and maintenance, I would say you need maybe one or two admins. The development is based on use cases, but on average, I would say you need some 10 to 15 BI developers. 

We pay for licensing for Power BI. 

We are also using MicroStrategy. I did not like the drillthrough feature in Power BI, but I liked it in MicroStrategy. The way visualization works, I found that the interactiveness of MicroStrategy was better than Power BI. Similarly to Power BI, you can comfortably use MicroStrategy if you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas. 

I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. 

I would recommend Power BI to those considering using it, but would also recommend that they explore it themselves and understand their requirements. Their requirements will be different, so it's all use case based. 

The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution.

It is quite flexible for reporting purposes.

This solution is resource-heavy. I would like to see it consume fewer resources. When I use it on my laptop, it consumes a lot of resources.

I have used this solution within the last 12 months.

We are using the latest version.

It can scale easily.

We have more than 50 people who are using this solution in my company. Across the company, most are in marketing and finance.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We use Oracle BI and Oracle OBIEE.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It would be better if the price was cheaper.

I would recommend this solution and suggest they use it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Compared to Cognos, Tableau and Power BI are pretty fast. 

The initial setup is very quick. Connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless compared to Cognos. Power BI eradicated dependency on a framework model. 

Power BI is cheaper than Tableau and Cognos.  Power BI Desktop comes free and the Pro license is $10 per month whereas Tableau desktop would cost you $70 per month. Cognos is mostly suited for large and medium size companies 

For someone who is new, I think that Power BI can be a little complicated. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Power BI a rating of seven. 

It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on. 

It should have more integrations.

I have been using this solution for probably two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. I have a few large customers of this solution.

I don't have any experience with their support.

I also use Tableau. Tableau and Power BI are similar in terms of capability.

It was easy. It was done in minutes.

I can do it on my own. You would require external consultants or in-house experts.

Licensing is on a monthly basis, but I am not sure.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

We primarily sell Power BI licenses. 

Mostly, we focus on the retail industry. Usually, we are using the Power BI reports for dashboards. We are also providing our customers with some data warehouse reporting. Basically, we do long-term categorization of stock and inventory numbers and sales figures so that they can compare the sales and stocks to the inventory numbers.

We tend to deal with physical inventory reports. We tend not to deal with the solution for financial operations.

The solution has different licensing tiers.

The product can scale if you need it to.

Technical support is quite good.

With the cloud deployment, there's no setup required.

The product works well for small or mid-level organizations.

The solution's stability could be improved. In the retail industry, due to issues with information updating and data uploading. Clients may end up pricing items wrong as they could accidentally base their choices on old or wrong data.

The licensing needs improvement. There needs to be a middle option between Pro and Premium versions. It could also be less expensive.

While we have experience with Microsoft tools for the past ten years, I personally have had experience with Microsoft BI for the past two or so years.

The solution is not really stable. I've faced a lot of limitations especially in terms of some data flows updates. We have faced some exceptions. Right now, we have created a case for Microsoft in order to solve some problems we've been having as, right now, there's some sort of system fault.

While the platform is a little more stable, the big problem is the latency issues around customer updates.

In a recent project, in Sweden, we faced an exception in Power BI from the update path. Whenever we refresh the animations and the fact tables, we faced something that said we couldn't upload the data. After 20 minutes we tried to refresh again. We didn't change anything with our reports or platform or anything related to infrastructure or schema. We didn't touch anything. An yet, the data is updated successfully. That leads us to ask the question: what was the problem 20 minutes ago? We still don't know the answer.

That is why we need some stability for the update service. We are deciding some business decisions based on this data. If this data is not updated, we may decide to take the wrong path. 

This is very important in the retail industry. For example in the grocery field, sometimes with vegetables or fruits or other products, customers need to decide to change the prices within lock days. They need to decide, based on demand, if they should increase or lower prices. They can't make the correct decisions if the numbers don't update.  

The scalability potential actually depends on your licenses. Microsoft provides three licenses. One of them is absolutely free. Another is called Pro. Yet another is per user or Premium. There is a huge difference between the Pro license and the Premium license. There is no need to scale the Pro license or other license models.

When you put the on-premise reports, you can scale out or scale up. It depends on your existing resources. However, in the services as a software (SaaS) version, it actually comes with Microsoft's units or Microsoft resources. 

We have an ASFP agreement with Microsoft. As a Gold Partner, Microsoft is pretty good and responding automatically and helping us resolve issues.

If a partner does not have an ASFP agreement, they tend to have to go to forums or try to Google answers to their problems.

We are aware that sometimes when we make changes to BI, the solutions might be complex. There might be SQL involved, which needs to be taken into account, for example. We may have to look into other resources and other tools to see if there are interactions that are the issue. However, Microsoft is quite helpful as we work through issues. We're quite satisfied with their level of support.

We also work with and sell MicroStrategy in Turkey. 95% of the MicroStrategy projects have been completed with our company. It is a direct competitor with Power BI. My company commonly does consulting for some small and medium markets and for that we recommend Power BI. Whenever we talk about enterprise-level solutions, the company we will use is MicroStrategy.

There isn't much of an installation process, as the solution is on the cloud.

There is a free license, however, it is limited. The Premium license and the Pro license functionalities are very different. Whenever we talk with our customers, they ask "Should we chose the Premium?" We say that "No, you don't need to, as it's too expensive. It is much more expensive than the Pro license." However, the Pro license functionality is not enough for some customers. There is no middle between Pro and the Premium. We need something in between.

The Pro license is maybe suitable for SMBs, small and medium-sized businesses. The premium version is ideal for companies that need to scale up and out.  

There also may be some additional costs that can drive up the price.

I prefer this product and I suggest Power BI to all customers, however, we know that if Power BI is a new idea, we make sure to show company-specific data or analytics for analyzing the data and how this solution can analyze everything quickly. That said, it's not for everybody. If all companies tried to put all their reporting expectations in the Power BI, it would not fit their expectations.

It's not a standalone solution. You need other items in your toolbelt. You need, for example, something that can handle raw data, you need warehousing, et cetera.

In general, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

The solution is stable.

It's a pretty scalable product.

Overall it's a good product. It is still rather new, therefore, for now, it's still a learning curve as we get used to all of the features and capabilities.

The charting tool could be improved.

The product could have better analytics capabilities.

The initial setup is not straightforward.

I've been using the solution for five months.

The solution is quite stable. I'd call it reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze and I can't recall bugs or glitches happening.

The solution is scalable. If your organization needs to expand it, it shouldn't be a problem to do so.

We have about five people on the solution, however, we don't have it fully functioning just yet.

I did not use a different solution previously before the implementation of this product. This is the first solution we've used for these purposes.

The initial setup is pretty complex. It's not straightforward or simple. You need to be a bit of an expert in order to handle it, and I am, unfortunately, not an expert. If you had more experience with it, you might find it easier than I did.

I was not involved in the pricing or procurement process of the solution. I'm not sure how licensing works of the overall cost of the solution on a monthly or yearly basis. It's not part of my day-to-day.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Microsoft.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we are using. It may be the latest.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate it at an eight. We've been pretty happy with it, even though it is quite new to us.

We primarily use Power BI for data science solutions.

This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it. This is true even for business people who want to do a little bit of self-service. The whole thing has become quite simplified, as compared to what it was.

There are many good features in this product.

The most valuable features are a combination of the DAX and the inquiry capability, plus the visual gallery that we have. I think that these three things, or the combination of them, is the best that we have found.

I would like to have the capability to schedule exports in different versions. For example, if I want to schedule a subscription and attach an Excel file, we don't have this capability right now. A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement.

We have been working with Power BI for more than five years.

Overall, it is pretty stable. The cloud version is definitely very stable, and I have found very few flaws or areas for improvement. We have been using it for more than five years and we have every intention to continue with it.

It has been pretty nice for us, in terms of scalability. There hasn't really been a problem, as such. We have approximately 300 users.

Technical support from Microsoft gets a big thumbs up from me. They have blogs, a support page, and the community is very active. Most of the answers we need, we find them there. 

With this amount of information available, we don't need to use technical support extensively. When we do post something on the blog or in the community, the response that we get is pretty prompt.

The last time we utilized technical support was when we were investigating creating a subscription with an Excel file attached to it. We found out that it isn't yet possible with the current version.

The initial setup is straightforward, to say that least. It took just a few days to deploy.

The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool.

My advice for anybody who is considering this tool is that if you want to move to a self-service BI, this is probably the best tool available right now. The self-service is pretty good in terms of os user acceptance, usage, and simplicity. It is something that everybody wants and Power BI does really well in that area.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is that if the data is not according to what you want, that really isn't a problem. It has been a problem in the past, especially where the data is not in the form or the shape that you need, but with Power BI, that problem can be solved very easily.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.