Microsoft Power BI Reviews

There are several different use cases. The most basic use case would be just to be able to share data from a database or a data repository. That's the most basic use case.

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization tool, is a BI tool. There are more than 1,000 use cases that you could use. There are countless use cases for which a BI tool or visualization tool could be used for.

The simplest use case is where a colleague in an organization who does not have any coding skills or does not have any technology background wants to be able to look at some data from a database or a repository of data. He or she could use Power PI just to be able to connect to that system and just take a look at or peek into that database. It is as simple as that.

Over the last six years, Microsoft Power BI has evolved, matured, has brought in a lot of new features. Six years back, when I first started using Microsoft Power BI, it was just one of the tools among the crowd of tools that I had access to and may not have been that interesting, at that point in time. It was fairly rudimentary and fairly basic in terms of its feature capabilities. However, in the last six years, Microsoft has put a lot of focus and effort into developing it further, and has, on a regular incremental basis, started deploying and enabling capabilities and features, which now makes Microsoft Power BI one of the leading BI tools in the industry.

We realized the benefits very quickly. In 30 minutes, a company can begin to realize the benefits.

In the most basic use case, which is for a user to be able to just access a data which he or she normally would not have been able to himself or herself, since they don't have SQL query knowledge, or they don't know how to access, log into a SQL Server or a database. They can do that using Power BI within half an hour or less.

Like any typical BI visualization tool, Microsoft has several features. The most interesting feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's very user-friendly.

It is a cloud-based BI tool even though it does come with a desktop client. The ability for a very beginner, basic user to get started with Power BI is very easy. Even if you don't have Microsoft licenses and just want to use a tool for analyzing data, without having to share it with others, you can do that with Microsoft Power BI.

I'm comparing this with other existing and newcomer BI tools. The look and feel of the tool has, only like a month back, undergone a major change. If not, for the last five years at least, last four years at least, the look and feel have been very, very similar all the time. 

It did not change much in the last four years. Barring a lot of functionalities and capabilities being added, it did not change much. The look and feel were pretty much the same. However, about a month back, the latest release of Power BI, they made some further, drastic changes to the way the buttons and the panels are set up. That said, they can do more. There are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs.

I've used the solution for six years now. 

The solution is quite stable and we have not had any, not come across significant bugs, so far. We've only come across some features which are missing or could have been improved, like certain types of charts that were missing in the past, which are being added. Some of the advanced charts are available as a paid service from third-party partners and not available out-of-the-box. There are very unique features or some very specific capabilities that were missing or are still missing. We could always manage it by bringing in a partner to create an add-on or something like that.

The solution is very scalable and we do plan to increase usage. 

We haven't opted for technical support yet as we have a few other tools which are also being used by the organization, in the new organization that I'm in, right now. Power BI was being offered to colleagues to use on a self-service basis. There were communities and subject matter experts within the organization who had offered their services to the wider organization to come and ask questions. It was basically community-based support, I would say, within the organization. 

Also, Microsoft offers free community-based support for Power BI and proactive support is simply paid. It's paid service from Microsoft and other partners, so we have not opted for that yet, something we will look into once it comes to that point. Yet, it's a fairly mature product. We don't think there would be issues with the platform. The issues would be more to do with how to use the platform, or how to use the platform in conjunction with other systems, other software, et cetera, which is more specific to our organization rather than something the vendor has to support us with.

You do get your questions answered eventually, however, you have to wait maybe one or two days to get the questions answered.

Positive

I have used more than ten to 15 different types of software in the past 20 years.

I have used Tableau and I have used Qlik Sense. These two are, I would say, the top two leading platforms. We switched completely to Power BI, however, we started using Power BI more, alongside Tableau and Qlik Sense. The organization where I used to work previously had the commercial ability to acquire multiple software, depending on use cases, or depending on business requirements, or needs. In the previous organization, the organization was using one particular platform, then they decided to bring in a second platform, then they decided to bring in the third platform. As part of that mix-and-match scenario, we ended up using Qlik Sense and Tableau. And then we also started, in parallel, using Power BI, which then started to get better feedback and reviews, in general, so we ended up using it more and more.

It comes bundled with Office 365. Office 365 is a SaaS-based office suite. Anything that you build on your desktop or Power BI, you can publish into the Office 365 cloud environment. It's relatively easy to get everything up and running. 

It's as simple as taking your credit card and buying an Office 365 license and configuring the AD group and you can be up and running. Of course, depending on how secure and structured you want to make your entire setup, it can take a few months, sometimes, with the full rollout to happen. 

A very basic pilot rollout can be done in a matter of a few weeks.

For the actual deployment and configuration, we just needed five people, and five resources working between six to 12 months. Some were required only for six months. Some are still continuing as part of further enhancements as some of the resources are being retained from a training and onboarding purpose so that they can do a training of the wider organization, and colleagues in the organization, show them how to use Office 365, and get trained on that. The actual development itself took less than two or three months.

In terms of maintenance, there are regular patch updates that get pushed from Microsoft. The backend IT support team needs to ensure all the patches are tested before they're deployed in production, for all the users to use.

Microsoft usually sells through a partner, most of these licenses, and Microsoft also usually recommends a partner. In our case, we did an RFP to bring in the subject matter experts, partners who are certified on Microsoft platforms.

We had a system integrator who came in and helped us deploy and roll out Microsoft 365. As part of that, as I mentioned, we got Microsoft Power BI. 

We are now thinking if we should switch on all the other capabilities of Microsoft Power BI or not.

We have noted an ROI, however, it varies from use case to use case.

There are some use cases in which if you deliver it, the cost savings or the revenue generated from that, or the benefits from that one single use case will cover the entire cost of all 65 licenses, for the entire year.

Then there are use cases, in which you'll have to wait for a few years or months before a company will actually see some benefit being derived.

They have made the desktop client free of cost, which is also what Qlik Sense is. The Qlik Sense Desktop is free of cost. Tableau, the web version of Tableau online, there's a trial period you can use it for. Microsoft also has made Power BI available as a free add-on, or a free complimentary add-on alongside Office 365 for corporate users. This means even if the organization does not want to use Power BI, if they're using Qlik Sense, Tableau, Looker, ThoughtSpot, Domo, or the other tools, Power BI will still be available to them when they're using Microsoft Office.

While it comes bundled with Office, you don't have to buy any additional licenses, just for building and publishing. That said, the moment you want to start sharing your reports, your dashboards, and your analysis with others, that is the point where you need to then start paying for additional capabilities or plans.

I've always been part of different transformation programs where we were required to evaluate a BI tool, to meet the business requirements. Usually, Power BI ends up coming in the short list of products from a BI perspective, from a BI reporting perspective, apart from sometimes Tableau, and Qlik Sense. Sometimes, we also come across ThoughtSpot, Sisense, and Domo. These are some of the other tools which we have also, sometimes, shortlisted.

The differences have become very, very minimal between solutions. There are very few, minor differences between different tools. About four or five years back, there used to be drastic capability gaps between the different tools. Four or five years back, Tableau was the most mature, followed by Qlik Sense, followed by MicroStrategy, followed by a few other tools like SAP Analytics, or a few others. Today, Power BI is alongside Tableau, and Qlik Sense is in the top three. That's based on my experience of having worked on all these three platforms. Tableau, among the three, has the best UI, user interface. Qlik has the best performance, in terms of building complex data models. Power BI, however, is the easiest and most fun to use when it comes to getting somebody to use the tool from scratch. 

There are a few other benefits and strengths. Qlik Sense and Power BI, both come with built-in ETL which is data integration capabilities. They have very mature data integration capabilities, as compared to Tableau, whereas Tableau has very basic integration capabilities. You need to buy another ETL product for it to be able to do a similar level of data transformation as Qlik Sense, or Power BI.

We are a customer and may also be a Microsoft partner, as we are a telecom. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

A client used Power BI mainly for banking reports. Another client was working in the field of laboratories, and they requested Power BI for the analysis of laboratory-related data for COVID-19. There were also some use cases where we used predictive analytics or utilized the power of Power BI services in the cloud.

It can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

It helps in automating the process of filling the data or refreshing the data to give you timely calculations for all the aspects of the dashboards that you have built. You can easily see all the real-time data with Power BI.

The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R.

You can integrate it with the cloud. On the desktop level, you just install the desktop installer, which is about a hundred megabytes or something like that, and it connects to the cloud. So, on the desktop, you can utilize the cloud power for AI and machine learning to help you with predictive analytics.

Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them.

I have been using this solution for six years.

It is stable. Solving dashboard issues on other products, such as Oracle, took us a lot of time, whereas solving issues in Power BI was so simple. The language they're using is also easy. In Power BI, you use the DAX language, which is derived from Excel. So, anyone who knows how to write Excel code would know how to deal with Power BI. It is going to be so simple.

The cloud version is scalable.

It is super easy to set up. I've been giving training on this to new employees, and they quickly learn how to work with the whole product. It doesn't take them more than one or two sessions.

The installation of Power BI Desktop on a computer takes a maximum of 10 minutes. You just have to install it on the computer, and that's it. Most of the services are over the cloud. When you do the subscription, you just connect or sign in with your company email address that has been registered, and that's it.

The on-premises version requires extra staff. It requires an engineer who knows how to implement AI algorithms and then connect them to the offline Power BI solution.

Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level.

They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it.

It has an on-premises version as well as a cloud version. I usually recommend people to work with the cloud version. In the on-premises version, if they want it to go with the artificial intelligence part, they are going to require engineers to configure it, whereas it is already there in the cloud version. It is already configured and affordable. The cloud version costs between $9 to $20 per user, which makes it very affordable, and you also have the capacity option, which costs about $4,000 per month per capacity. The capacity option is usually for huge enterprises. Regular companies, even banks, can work efficiently with the cheapest option, which is $9 to $20 per user.

After working with Power BI, I would rate it an eight out of 10. There is huge competition in the market when it comes to BI tools, and there are fractional differences between Power BI and some of its competitors.

I would describe myself as more of a casual user, only because I have so many other things that I have to get done. I wish I could be more of a user, but it's hard. Right now, I have two different main use cases. I use it for teaching. At another institution, I use it for demonstrating how easy it is to build dashboards. It was really to show to all my users the benefit of business analytics. I use it to demonstrate how easy it is to generate your own analytics versus having a department run reports for you then putting it in Excel and making graphs. 

I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice.

The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section. It's probably designed by data analysts that typically get the data from somewhere else. So, one person logs into Power BI, moves the data around and puts it in the proper form then somebody else goes in from the dashboard. What I'm finding more and more is that the person playing with the data is also going to be the person building the dashboard, so the interface needs to be more seamless and dumbed down for the average user. 

Tableau is much better at that, which is probably why it's more expensive. The days where one person works on the data and someone else does the analytics are coming to an end. In the past, larger organizations usually had a dedicated analytics team and a dedicated data team. Now we buy data as a service, so we got rid of our data team and we don't have analysts per se. Instead, we have smart users. So I think Microsoft BI needs to move on to the next iteration of truly user-friendly solutions.

I've been using Microsoft BI for about three years.

Microsoft BI has never crashed on me.

I honestly can't comment on how scalable Microsoft BI is because I've never taken it beyond training or simple use. But I would imagine, if it's on Azure, that it's scalable. I haven't had the pleasure of scaling it, so I don't know, but it doesn't strike me as a solution that would have problems with scalability.

I have not had to contact technical support, but I've actually downloaded and taken three Power BI courses for free and they're very good.

I was using Tableau but the licensing cost went up when Salesforce required them to raise the price. But if the price hadn't changed, I would've absolutely stuck with Tableau because I like it. I do not know about the cost of the licenses. We buy it from the state and when it went up, our CIO at the time said no more Tableau licenses. I had to scramble to find a replacement, and fortunately, I discovered that Power BI is included in Microsoft 365. However, I prefer Tableau's interface. Microsoft BI's user interface is convoluted in terms of how you attach a data source. You have a separate screen for defining your data and then you have to jump to a different screen to model the results. In other words, there are two separate interfaces for data and analytics. In Tableau, it's more seamless. 

Setup is very easy. You click on the icon, download the MSI, and it loads itself. It takes about a couple of hours to deploy overall.

I'd rate Microsoft BI as an eight out of 10. The biggest drawback is the user interface. From what I'm seeing, Windows 11 is going to have a more user-friendly interface. Even Microsoft Edge is adopting a more user-friendly interface. I'm hoping that Power BI follows this trend as well. 

My advice for anyone who is thinking about adopting Microsoft BI is to understand what you're trying to do with it. If you're trying to do analytics with it, then it depends on the kind of analytics. If you're want to do statistical analytics, it's not the tool for you. It's a tool that's better suited for visual analytics than it is for straight-up analytics. If you're dealing with patterns and data, it's great. If you're working with numbers and data, it's not so good. You're better off with a statistical package.

I developed a product based on Power BI. I intensely use it. 

I also use it to generate reports and monthly management reports. It's connected to the production database with connectors. It's not so big data, but it's for medium-sized datasets.

It's easy to develop custom solutions. The DAX scripting solution of Power BI is easy to use and covers a lot of needs. 

It's user-friendly. It also has the capacity to connect to a variety of data sources without any other solution – especially within the Microsoft environment- which is very easy.

For us, it's difficult to manage business data and visualize and model it without Power BI or a similar tool. Although, I am more comfortable using Power BI than any other tool. Data modeling is one of the most important features of Power BI because you can model almost anything. For me, it is very helpful. 

I haven't personally faced challenges with Power BI, but it might be challenging when it comes to big data usage. I haven't had a real challenge yet - maybe it could become challenging due to a lack of information or skills to use Power BI at a more advanced level.

So, the product could be complex for inexperienced users. It's very complex and you need to keep up with the updates. Otherwise, you can miss a lot of nice features that can be useful in your daily work.

I'm looking for something that can make it much easier to incorporate Power BI visuals or dashboards into, let's say, Power Apps – custom Power Apps or anything like that. 

The most important thing would be to seamlessly embed reports in applications. For example, to have buttons that can be navigated through multiple solutions – from Power Apps to Power BI to SharePoint – via links or something like that. 

If this transition is more natural (so users don't notice they're moving between solutions), it will be very helpful in developing complex solutions without sophisticated workarounds or lots of code. 

Staying within the low-code area, there's a lot of potential for interesting things. This is my main focus – developing low-code solutions that integrate with Power BI.

I work with Microsoft's entire suite of products. 

I have been using Power BI for more than five years. 

I haven't had major issues because my usage is at a medium level, not a high level. I haven't personally interacted with Microsoft support. But, there seems to be a lot of information and people using this solution, and it's easy to escalate problems within your company. You can learn a lot of things quickly using resources like ChatGPT or Microsoft's own solutions, which are very helpful within the Microsoft ecosystem.

I used MicroStrategy. It's very nice, and similar, but a bit more difficult to connect to other systems. You need more technical skills. With Power BI, those connections are easier. I am not obliged to learn a lot of technical aspects.

For me, Power BI is a very good option. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, working with people who use Microsoft solutions, Power BI makes sense. It might be a bit more difficult if you're in a different ecosystem – companies tend to promote their own technologies for upsells and cross-sells. It's a sales thing.

Price is the best feature of Power BI! You get a lot of value for the price. If you know how to use it, it's a great BI solution for your money. 

A complete solution license is no more than fifty euros per month – that's not expensive at all. Even thirty euros per month is enough to have Power BI, Power Apps, SharePoint solutions, and things like that. Very, very cheap.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I would definitely recommend using this solution. Power BI offers very good value for money. You do need some skills, but not necessarily deep technical ones. 

It's more important to understand the business context and how to design effective reports in order to put Power BI and connected solutions from the Power Platform to best use. 

My view is that we often overemphasize the technology and miss the true asset: the value that Power BI and the others bring to the business.

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.

Currently, it is used in our financial reporting and financial consideration reports.

It is stable.

It has good functionality and is fully integrated with Microsoft products. If you have already a direct connection or direct integration with Microsoft products, it is very good actually. In some cases, we just developed our BI dashboard and sent it to PowerPoint, for example. It'll be published as the power BI format, which is very good as a feature, to have that capability to just easily populate everything in PowerPoint.

Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially.

It's pretty user-friendly.

The product can scale.

Our main concern with Power BI is it doesn't have a connection with the finance application. Power BI is used to present some financial data. However, if there is no direct connection or a ready API to be connected either to Oracle ERP or SAP or a different ERP, it won't be very useful. We need more integration capabilities. 

We've been using the solution for five years. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability has been great. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

In my organization, there are about 10 to 20 users. The majority have shifted to Qlick.

I haven't contacted technical support in the past. The product has been so stable we haven't needed assistance. 

We have multiple BI tools. We previously worked with Oracle BI. Our expectations were not met, and therefore we moved over to Microsoft BI.

In my sector, currently, we are using Qlik Sense. We started using it one year ago.

We are shifting from Microsoft to Qlik due to the fact that we have Oracle ERP as a back end. We are trying to find a technology or BI, which already has a direct connection with this ERP. We went into Qlik Sense for that reason.

The initial setup is straightforward, actually. It is like any other Microsoft product. All of Microsoft's products are straightforward. It isn't complicated. This is one of the main benefits.

I'm not sure how long the deployment process was. I can't speak to how big the technical team was that handled the rollout.

We pay an annual licensing fee. 

I would recommend the solution if they already have a Microsoft ERP system. If they have already Microsoft and they have already their financial system in place and if they don't have data movement, Power BI will be very powerful. If a company has different financial systems, they have to track all these data points first, build the business model and then import it to Power BI. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

My primary use case of Power BI is to generate dashboards and reports based on past data. Especially for people who aren't engineers, like purely business people, Power BI is helpful because it allows them to analyze and assess their complete business solutions end to end. Power BI provides insights that can help company growth, in terms of revenue and ROI. This solution is cloud-based. 

The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with. 

This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low. 

Other than that, their licensing costs could be lowered. Microsoft handles everything. For example, if I want to publish a report order from Powerpay, Microsoft doesn't allow me to do this. It's a complete business, but the licensing is very costly. I don't think Microsoft will change their pricing system, though. 

I have been using Power BI for the past five years. 

Power BI can handle a maximum of one to four gigabytes of data, but the performance becomes very slow if you handle big data. Since this solution is cloud-based, it's always updated to the latest version. 

The development is very easy because it depends on each computer. Power BI is a desktop solution that you install on your computer. Once I complete my development, I publish through the internet, which the external users are using. The number of users doesn't matter. 

There is a Power BI community, which I'm very happy about. They're there for anything and they're very helpful. In the past, Microsoft has helped us with infrastructure problems. 

In the past, I worked with other Python data visualization tools like Dash and Panel. Compared to those tools, Power BI is very easy.  

The installation is very straightforward. I did it myself and it took barely ten minutes. 

I implemented this solution myself. 

You don't need a license for the development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them. 

Another visualization tool I've heard of is Splunk, which helps to handle and visualize huge amounts of data. In the future, if Power BI is unable to handle this sort of streaming data, I may consider switching to Splunk. When I extract huge amounts of data with Denodo, Power BI becomes very slow—for example, it takes more time for the display to load. Right now, Power BI can handle a maximum of around one to four gigabytes, whereas Splunk can handle very large amounts of data. 

I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution because it's the best visualization tool I have ever worked with, but the licensing is costly. 

We use Microsoft BI all over our enterprise but our main use is for the organizational dashboard. My organization sends all of our systems and ERP data into a Power BI dashboard, which goes to all the managers, the leadership, and then gets reported up to the company executives.

Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.

My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations.

Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop.

In terms of the performance, it could always improve sometimes. It's only slow to update. The automated data feeds have to be all updated.

I have been using Microsoft BI for two years.

The stability of Microsoft BI is very good. We have not had an issue.

Microsoft BI has scaled very well for us. We have a very large organization with users all across the company.

We have approximately 100 users using this solution. It's a standard program for analysts and even managers will use it. It is a standard business analyst software. 

The solution is extensively being used in our organization.

I have not contacted Mircosoft for technical support. I only use our internal support.

We previously used SAS and it is similar to Microsoft BI. It's a little different in the visualization. It was more on analytics, but it also had the visualization.

We had SAS Enterprise Guide which was on-premise. When they were looking at cloud solutions, they kind of opened it up for more possibilities. The deciding factors of why we switched to Microsoft BI was we already had many Microsoft products and we have a SQL Server Data Warehouse. There's good integration between our existing Microsoft systems with Microsoft BI.

I was part of the initial user testing of Microsoft BI, but it was mostly IT that handled all the initial implementation.

We have a dedicated IT team of two administrators that support Microsoft BI. One of the administrator's full-time job is to manage the Microsoft BI.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do some training. There is enough training curriculum available to get people going.

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.