Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We primarily use the solution primarily for making dashboards. We are also doing analytics on Microsoft BI.

The solution is very stable.

The product is easy to use and simple to navigate.

The product has proven to be quite flexible.

It is quite scalable and it is doing the work that we want it to. 

We'd like the solution to be more scalable. 

We'd like the ability to manage it on the cloud, as a cloud-based solution. It is running out of business as it is not able to keep pace with the big data. Big data is not something that BI can support. It cannot be scaled that much. 

The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files. Microsoft is aware of this.

I've been using the solution for seven to eight years at this point. It's been a while. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is very good.

The solution is quite scalable, although, in our case, as we are not on the cloud, we are facing some issues.

We have more than ten people using the solution currently.

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I wasn't a part of the initial setup. That was something that was handled by another team. I can't speak to how long it took to deploy.

My understanding is that you only need two people to deploy the solution. Admins usually handle it.

I don't have any insights into the licensing and payments required. 

We are using the latest version of the solution. I'm not sure of the exact version number. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten. For us, it has met our expectations and we enjoy its capabilities.

I'd recommend this product to other users and organizations.

It's primarily for reporting, and the performance has been very good.

Other people can access data much more easily than before. Its usability is the main advantage, people in the company are using it.

It works mostly with Excel, and it's a very good price.

The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective.

The stability is very good now; it was definitely really poor a year ago.

Because it's cloud-based, it's very scalable.

I haven't used tech support specifically for Power BI but, in general, for Office and Office 365, it has been very responsive.

Before, we just had a whole bunch of spreadsheets lying around all over the place. So we really needed to get things tightened up but we weren't ready to invest in a database. But with Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are usability and support.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

The shortlist was, obviously, Tableau because they're in everyone's face and a couple of other smaller tools.

I rate it a nine out of 10 because it's very cost-effective, so it's very accessible in that respect, and a lot of folks do use spreadsheets so it helps ease the transition from using just spreadsheets to a more mature reporting environment.

My advice is, speak to your users because, at the end of the day, if they don't use it, you've failed, which was the case with other reporting tools.

Our primary use cases for this solution are Health and Wellness claims and short-term and long-term disability data.

It helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management.

• Ease of use
• Dashboard
• Easy access to databases and spreadsheets
• Multi-table access

• More graphics and overlays
• More analytic tools
• More interfaces to databases, especially multi-table management

The self-service part.

We are a consultancy firm, helping our clients with billing and business intelligence solutions. We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way.

The navigation. The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit. It's user friendly, but you would like to have it even more user friendly.

When you do selections in one tab in Report, and then you move to the next tab, then you have to do your selections again. So one tab as a global, central selection possibility would help.

If you compare to QlikView, there's still a lot of functionality that QlikView has that Power BI doesn't. For most companies, Power BI is good enough, especially if you consider the price tag it's an easy choice. But it still has some catching up to do to match the functionality in QlikView.

Eight to 10 months.

It feels very stable. A bit slow sometimes when you change stuff and you want to refresh data and apply it to the data model in your queries. You want to apply that to your reports and dashboards and it can be a bit slow sometimes.

We don't have that experience yet. We still don't know how it is to deploy it in larger scales. So, that's my concern, but I haven't seen the scalability issues at our clients.

No, not yet. There are a lot of self-training videos and such out there on the internet and on the Microsoft websites.

QlikView and Qlik Sense. We felt demand in the market for Microsoft Power BI. Also, within my company we are selling services around Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Power BI hooks very well into the other Microsoft products.

It was pretty straightforward. Not much to set up. Cloud service and desktop client that you need to download and install, but if you have worked with other similar tools then you and know about that.

We are constantly looking for what is hot in the market and this has really come up as a rising star on the BI market, so it was not so much of a question about it at all. Quite obvious.

There are some limitations in regards to the navigation part.

Microsoft SSRS biggest advantage is its ability to integrate with other third party components. You could integrate it with Share Point web part or you can access it from a Web browser, depending on your existing scenario you don’t need to change much to be able to integrate SSRS with your existing application. Microsoft SSAS offers low cost BI solutions comparing with IBM Cognos, licensing for SSAS is core-based or you could opt for server + CAL-based license which is very low in comparison with IBM Cognos. Microsoft SSRS & SSAS suite is uncompromising when it comes to performance. It provides very high performance and it could be connected to many different data sources. It requires very less time to build Microsoft SSRS & SSAS solution.

Microsoft SSRS is unable to provide a mechanism where poor performance reports could be prevented to run on production environment. In case if a user creates a report which can cause huge impact on server resources / performance it should not be allowed to run on production server during normal working hours. Alternative that is provided is to use subscription option to deliver reports to particular directory or email them at scheduled time (preferably non-working hours).Microsoft SSRS does not offer any interoperability with Andriod or iPad at this time (need to consider this if you are planning to develop reports for these environments) Microsoft SSRS & SSAS suite is very easy to configure and maintain. You don’t need any license if you are looking to try out Microsoft SSRS; you can simply download and use Microsoft SQL Server Express (with Advanced Services). You can create dashboards, drill through reports, charts, graphs, maps, dynamic grouping using Microsoft SSRS.

It offers a very vibrant MSDN community along with Microsoft support staff for assistance.

I have been a professor at a program mastery at UISEK University for the past two years where I teach students how to use these tools.

Being able to transfer data with the Power Query feature is great for teaching with about one to two hundred rows of data. I am also able to see the relationship between multiple tables and create various sheets and dashboards.

The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script.

Additionally, in the next release, I would like to be able to export thing, such as charts, as a PDF.

I have been using this solution for two years.

I would rate the stability of Microsoft BI at 70 percent. 

While the solution is scalable, it certainly has its limitations.

I find the solution to be 70 percent stable. 

Although the solution comes with limitations, it is scalable. 

Technical support is not that bad, fairing in the average range. 

The solution is not that difficult to install, although this will vary with the experience of the person responsible for its installation. 

There are five people responsible for the deployment, their roles comprising a mixed bag, some of them being managers. 

Our customers definitely incur a licensing fee. 

The only other cost, besides the licensing fee, would be to cover support. 

There are only three customers using the solution at present. 

I always offer more than one solution and the person must choose which he feels best suits his needs. All solutions have plusses and minuses and these should be carefully weighed before one decides which one to go with. Once the client has settled on a solution, this is what I will go with. We are talking about Microsoft store. Generally speaking, our clients prefer to make use of Microsoft. 

I rate Microsoft BI as a seven out of ten. 

This rating is based on what we have observed about the solution thus far, although it may be amended over the next few months as we become more acquainted with it.