Microsoft Power BI Reviews

It’s not just a specific tool I use when providing solutions. In these scenarios, clients often have a significant Microsoft presence with servers for data collection, whether it's in a data lake, data warehouse, or a data lake house. Their users typically require reporting, dashboards, or ad-hoc queries based on their specific business needs. However, most vendors tend to offer inflexible solutions, focusing on predefined reports.

Power BI stands out because it provides considerable flexibility in creating reports, dashboards, and various types of analytics to meet those dynamic requirements. It is lightweight and easy to use with good support.       

Microsoft BI typically connects to a database, often SQL Server, but it's also capable of connecting to multiple databases, pulling data from them, and allowing for data consolidation. You can then aggregate and generate dashboards and reports from this combined data. Personally, I wouldn't claim to have the expertise to suggest significant changes or additional features, as it functions quite well as is.

I have been using this solution for the past five years. 

It is a stable solution. 

It's a cloud-based platform, and it scales seamlessly based on your usage, which is one of the key advantages of cloud services. You pay according to your usage, without worrying about licenses or ownership. However, there are some limitations to consider. While it's a front-end tool for visualization and analytics, it lacks extensive customization options. If you require complex reports or queries, Microsoft offers support to help you achieve those goals. In my experience over the past five years, I haven't encountered any use case that couldn't be addressed with Power BI. On the contrary, I faced performance issues with other tools like Spotfire, which prompted us to explore different solutions. The effectiveness of Power BI also depends on factors like architecture, deployment, and network quality. If network configurations aren't optimized, it can lead to slow data transfer. However, being a cloud-based solution, the cloud infrastructure often manages these issues. Nevertheless, if you want the best performance, you might need to invest in improving your network infrastructure.

Positive

I'm not very familiar with the licensing aspect, as it operates in the cloud as a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. Essentially, you pay based on cloud cost models, which might include hourly rates or similar billing structures introduced by Microsoft. Many organizations utilize it and pay for its services, somewhat like Office 365. It's a cloud-based platform that provides the necessary services, including support, for development, and you pay accordingly for the usage.

 would recommend the solution, rating it eight out of ten. There’s no such thing as an ideal product. In my perspective, perfection remains an unattainable goal. However, I can't rate it lower than eight because Microsoft actively invests in BI's development and expansion. They have a roadmap and allocate resources to it, which is evident in the growing user base. This continuous growth adds value to the product and benefits its users.

We use the solution for data analytics, so we use it to manage data governance, manage the data for certain organizations, and present it in a way that is more advanced than the manual reporting that was being done before via Excel. Now it's kind of interactive. It's more modern, so there are a lot of new features. It can be integrated with more BI tools also.

I've been in different organizations with different setups. I've experienced using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid.

Considering that it's Microsoft, it can be integrated with the Power Platform, which is also Microsoft-based, like SharePoint, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, which is the most user-friendly. It can also be integrated with more systems or domains that are non-Power BI domains, so it can be connected using API, SQL, or Azure. You can connect into your local premises, or database, et cetera. There's a lot that you can use Power BI with, and I think it's the number one BI platform in the market.

Based on my experience, everything's good in Power BI. Consistently, it's being updated every month. There's a new feature that is being added to the platform, but I think one thing that can be improved is with regard to the error messages. When there is a problem, the error message is not specific about what's causing the problem. Maybe they intentionally generalize it because there could be a lot of causes. From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT.

There needs to be more specific error messages. You encounter problems normally for the development part and maintainability part, and there are some issues that you or any developers would encounter. It's resolvable, but it would take some effort to really dig in and investigate. Some of the messages, for example, will say that the main package is missing, which could mean a lot of things. It could be a formatting error, it could be a file type error, it could be a transformation error on the helper file, et cetera. If there was a sub-description of what that is, it would be a great improvement on Power BI.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is very stable. It's been around for more than five years. It was released to the market around 2015, it was conceptualized in 2011, and consistently it's been at the top of the market, against all its competitors, because it's a Microsoft product. I think the secret there is in the way they update their report consistently. The platform is being updated every month, so all the needs of the developers are being met.

It's scalable. You can be a junior developer and work on your mini projects or your supporting mini team, and you can create your own presentation with Power BI, as simple as that. You can also handle multi-database projects and huge enterprise level data and combine all the different systems, get all the data, and put it into Power BI. Power BI has the capability and the power to cater that.

There are times when I can't resolve certain problems, and of course I'll exhaust all my resources. I would talk to my colleagues as well. Aside from that, there are BI groups or BI developer groups on Facebook, wherein I just post a question and then we all help each other. But if there are problems that can't be resolved, we go to Microsoft and create a ticket.

You don't need any technical support for BI because you have a very big community. There's Google, and then there are a lot of people who are very willing to help.  Adam, from Guy in a Cube, is very popular. He's part of Microsoft, and he's popular on YouTube. He answered one of my questions, and it's a very hard question. I think a lot of the problems that I encountered were resolved.

I have also used Active Directory. I was a service desk analyst, which is a level one IT. For Active Directory, I use that to support the organization's directory, IT concerns like internet error issues, their profile, if they can't access a certain website, their password needs to be reset, et cetera. 

Power BI has different kinds of setups, so one setup would be connecting to an SQL server database. I have experience connecting to SQL databases, and I do basic SQL coordinates because normally it's done in collaboration with SQL administrators.

I'm a seasoned BI developer, so it's easy for me, especially if it's not a very complicated project. There are different setups, depending on the project and depending on the organization. There are really complicated ones. For example, if you are going to connect to SSA live connection, a cube has to be built, there will be expenses, et cetera. There are requirements that would involve different teams and different people because of the expenses, et cetera. There are also simple ones like when you're just connecting to Big Data, or SharePoint, or SAPI, or local, or databases. It depends on projects, but for me as a seasoned developer, I think it's going to be easy.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10, against all the other competitors and as a BI tool.

It's a 10 because of the price. It's not that expensive compared to other BI tools. It's also with regard to maintainability. It's easier to understand, easy to manage, and it's very flexible. You can create projects, you can create a website, et cetera. It also has accessibility. It can be integrated with a lot of systems and applications. It's the leading BI tool in the market.

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.

We are using this solution for analytic dashboards.

The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well. 

When it comes to security Microsoft BI can integrate well with Microsoft Domain Services, you are able to make it as secure as you want.

There are useful visualizations available in the dashboards.

If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3.

In a future release, they need to have better integration to allow any visualization that is done in other solutions, such as D3 or Tableau, to be able to be imported in Microsoft BI easily.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.

The solution is stable when the database is reasonably sized. If you have large databases of 20 million rows it can begin to have difficulties requiring a purchase of more hardware.

The scalability is good. If you have a direct query, Microsoft BI can run on billions of rows of data.

Microsoft BI is available to the 70,000 users in my organization.

This solution is used extensively because everyone has access to it, not because it is the best.

The support from Microsoft could improve.

The solution is easy to install.

We did the implementation of the solution.

For those customers we have that use Microsoft BI on a dedicated server, we have a technical team that does the maintenance.

I have evaluated Tableau and D3.

I would recommend Microsoft BI over Tableau if you are comfortable with Microsoft solutions. Additionally, understand your use case and choose the best solution that fits your needs.

I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.

I'm a project manager and we are customers of Microsoft.

I like the toggling feature, the ability to switch from one page to another. 

I have a couple of dashboards that are weekly and monthly. I was able to download the dashboard, but I cannot paste any images into PowerPoint. There are also visuals based on the brand that should automatically pop up in the graph and which should be a toggling option. And I'm having performance issues if I want to add two or three tables at a time, which I could easily do in Tableau. Copy-pasting data to PowerPoint for presentation to the executive level should be easy but we're only able to copy the visual, not the underlying data. 

I've been using this solution for the past eight months. 

The solution is scalable but we haven't yet migrated everyone to Power BI. Our users are not finding Power BI as good as Pique, which perhaps they're just more used to. They're trying but some of the features available in Pique are not there so they are not comprehensively using it. It's being used mainly for internal analysis for now. 

We initially used Tableau because our data was an internal data source, and now all of our data is migrated to tool environments, that the Power BI is more comfortable with. BI is also a free product which is another reason the company recommends it.

The initial setup was straightforward, we have a Power BI admin team who take care of all that. 

Because of performance issues and because we're unable to do all the aggregation, I rate this solution six out of 10. 

Usually, when dealing with business intelligence projects with big data, all customers have Office 365 but within these licenses, Microsoft BI is often included.

The use case depends on the project. For example, in the logistics project, we need maybe four persons. For retail sales without stocks, it's a very easy project for us, but only for sales, and purchase orders, it's a standard part of the tool, to incorporate warehousing. Sometimes it's more difficult to clean the data if you have something like visualizations. It is often more difficult to understand what kind of data you need for the customer, or the strategy of the company who needs the information, to build a suitable solution. Customers often change their requirements. That's why Microsoft BI is more useful than traditional user tools, as it is flexible to changing requirements.

It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers. Microsoft BI has a good online community. You don't need to be an engineer to use it. In Microsoft BI you can embed the visualisation and reports into your applications. Embedded items are much faster and cheaper to use. It's very easy to work with the customers using this kind of tool, rather than say, Oracle. I have used the personal edition, but some customers have been trained to use the professional version. Initially, I spent a lot of time learning the new system. As I was already experienced in other, similar technologies it was not difficult to understand the visualizations. I encouraged our clients to do more with Microsoft BI.

It should work faster and have more common languages so that you can use it more in different types of connections. It doesn't work well on big data. It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake. It uses the DAX language, which is not used widely. Maybe they should develop this part of the tool to improve access to people who don't know DAX. Sometimes it needs to have a special configuration and hardware to connect to a data warehouse. So, interoperability with other systems could be improved.

I began using it a few years ago. I was involved in testing and last year, I was tasked with some large projects in Azure which included databases, a data warehouse with SQL, and Azure SQL. It is a cloud-based service, which means that a project is easy to use and design. You can use different tools for different things, but all the visualization in Microsoft BI is all in one tool. 

Microsoft BI is stable and works consistently well. 

Microsoft BI is a very scalable tool. You can start small and build up your project as you wish. 

I used Microsoft Azure support because we have a project. I have a good relationship with Microsoft. I don't have any problems.

It is easy to install Microsoft BI. You simply download and install it from the Microsoft Microsoft BI website, and it is available to download on windows. It can be downloaded and installed in 5 minutes.

Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version. Setting up Microsoft BI is simple.

Oracle products are well-engineered but too heavy to accomplish small tasks. However, to use it for enterprise, you need to have a lot of knowledge about the different kinds of tools available. It has more flexibility but is more complex because it's designed for enterprise-level systems. Comparing this to Oracle which is at least 10 years old. Java is also old, but it's more structured. It's more proprietary.

Every month Microsoft puts in another update. We are likely to use Microsoft BI in future projects. Microsoft BI does not fit every business case, so for that reason, I would give it an eight out of 10.

We deal with government agencies that compile stats and data. For instance, the use cases for the department of education are all school-related. They need to know the number of schools in a given region, attendance, etc. They also need to monitor monthly changes in the data, so they run analytics to see where enrollment and attendance are dropping or how schools are performing. 

Recently, we developed an application for the South African statistical bureau. They use Power BI for their dashboards to show precisely how many people were counted in which areas, and where they have the challenges. We have different use cases depending on the project and the client's requirements.

It's deployed in the cloud because Microsoft has switched to offering Power BI as a service. Most of our clients are doing all of their business intelligence primarily on the cloud, but we still have clients that are running SQL who prefer to do their own intelligence internally instead of using cloud solutions.

The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics. 

There are probably several other useful intelligent tools included with Power BI that we never use, but they might be good for other use cases. For instance, if you're selling consumer products, you might benefit from Power BI's ability to track sales performance. But our government customers mostly use data visualization internally to make decisions. 

I'm not a heavy Power Bi user. I use it as my CRM, and it gives me all the information that I need. I haven't found anything that isn't useful for what I'm working on at the moment. Maybe later, I might think of something and find that Power BI doesn't have. It's quite an improvement compared to using Microsoft SQL for business intelligence. 

We've been working with Power BI for many years. Before we started using Power BI, we were on SQL SSIS and SSRS. We've been in the BI business launched back in 2003. Most of our business was business intelligence even though we didn't have a lot of analytics. 

We do quite a lot of data warehousing, business intelligence, etc., but when we started, we were mainly dealing with data manipulation. I would say it has been more than 15 years.

I don't have any complaints because we used to be a partner of a company that set up our environment. They are a sales partner, and our sales are very good, but there were always issues with the technical support. At the moment, I would still recommend everyone to move to Microsoft Power BI regardless of their environment.

It's highly scalable and stable. 

One of the vendors we used to work with was Qlik, but we found that Qlik's support wasn't as good as what we're getting from Microsoft. With IBM, the biggest challenge was that companies didn't have the analytics skills to use their solution. Customers would complain that it didn't do what they wanted it to do, but it is not the tool. It's the skill that you have on the market. 

Microsoft made sure they certified competent solution implementers. It was great. We were privileged to be one of those companies that Microsoft picked, and they helped us train some of our technicians to be adept at some of these solutions.

All of our technicians are certified, so Microsoft refers certain organizations to us locally for help implementing their solutions. We have a solid technical team, especially around the Microsoft Power Apps, including Power BI.

Deploying Power BI is straightforward because they've made it so easy with cloud solutions when they came out with the Microsoft Power Apps. Power Apps includes Power BI, Microsoft Flow, and some others. I do everything myself, so I can do my workflows in the background of Power BI on all the applications even though I'm not an everyday applications development person. I haven't done development in years.

With Power Apps, you don't necessarily need to install anything because it's already there on the cloud. You customize it and point it to your data sources. Within a couple of minutes, you're done. Then from there on, you can customize your reports however you want. I think it's effortless to work with.

The number of people needed for deployment depends on the size of the organization, and the scope of what you're trying to do. You may have a small organization with fewer than 500 people, but they might deal with a lot of data. That means the project is going to be very big. 

Conversely, you could have an organization with about 2,000 people, but they are not a data-intensive organization. Then you will need just a few people. For much larger organizations, you'll find that you might need to have the whole applications development team of between five to 10 people for the actual implementation, including your project manager, business analysts, and various technical support personnel.  

For a big organization, you would maybe have five technical guys, including your lead as well as two senior technical people and two juniors. Then as the project grows, you can add four more. At the end of the day, we're looking at about five to 10 people for a bigger project.

However, it's not the same as an on-prem deployment. Most of the work is customization because everything else has been done on Azure. Generally, with things like your standard Power BI deployment, you need just about five people. That includes the project manager and the business analysts plus two or three technical people. 

You do an installation and all the customization a client wants, but from there on, you run out of work to do because everything is running smoothly. I've heard some say that it's making people lazy because if you do everything correctly the first time around, you won't have anything to do for a couple of months except maybe change a couple of things for users. From the technical point of view, you find that you have absolutely no work to do until you move on to the next client. The deployment is quick versus how long it used to take as before we went on to Azure.

You don't need a large team for maintenance because somebody else takes care of it. At most, you need two or three technical people and then an account manager. Probably about three. You're not managing the service or the infrastructure. You are just managing the environment.

The management is much easier compared to how we used to do it before. You needed maybe six or seven people, with some managing the environment and others the infrastructure. For example, the department of education has a user base of more than 500,000 people, but the whole environment is managed by two people. With the Azure infrastructure, everything running in the background is taken care of. 

The return on investment with Microsoft is quite good. The value of the product is far higher than the price you pay. The most significant added value with Microsoft products is their ease of use. If you buy things like Power BI, you become a Microsoft partner and gain access to some customer training, so you learn to optimize everything related to Power BI.

They go the extra mile. They have the training online, so when you get stuck, you can go through the training and know exactly where you made a mistake instead of going out to a training institution and spending a lot of money for precisely the same training. The licenses you pay over five years don't even make a dent in some companies' budgets.

For instance, one of our customers was running a Software AG solution analytics solution. Even though we are a Software AG partner, we suggested they go with a different solution because of their budget. We implemented Power BI, and now they don't want to go back to the previous product because they're saying this one is much more user-friendly than before.

Most of the customers we work with go for volume licenses. Some pay annually or get a more extended license for three to five years. All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years.

I think that's helpful because most government institutions budget on a five-year basis. They have a five-year plan broken down into an annual OPEX. The CAPEX will be five years, and everything else would be OPEX. Most of these licenses get put on an OPEX whereby the client pays once. Then for the five years, they don't necessarily have to worry about anything with Microsoft.

These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid. I guess that is a risk you take in business.

I would rate Microsoft BI nine out of 10. We buy from a couple of vendors, and Microsoft is always at the top of the list for ease of use, simplicity, and cost. I've used the other vendors, but I'm still in love with Microsoft.

I largely work with the engineering and R&D teams. Typically, the data insights and data teams use Power BI for business-related data visualization. However, for me and my customers, most of the tools like Power BI and Tableau are used to do data visualization for the engineering data. That could be even predicting the behavior of a machine, meantime between failure, or tracking of an IoT center data or even the behavior of the fleet management and things like that. In all the engineering use cases where we need data visualization, we use this product.

We have 16,000 to 17,000 or more people who are trained in insights and data. This group uses all the data analytics tools, data visualization tools, BI tools, and all the other tools from a business use cases perspective. It could be market basket analysis, sales reports, and all those kinds of other business reporting.

The solution has been stable.

We've found that the scalability meets our current needs.

It's good for data visualization and analysis. 

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty easy.

Technical support has always been great for us, as strategic partners. 

There could be more scalability.

Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data. Those would be good to have.

We've been using the solution since Microsoft introduced the solution to the market.

The product is more or less stable. Power BI doesn't have any problem with the stability aspect.

The solution can scale. It meets our needs.

We are dedicated partners. We have a couple of Microsoft architects that are dedicated to us. We have fairly decent support. I don't have any problem with them. If you ask a commercial end-user what kind of Microsoft support they get, in that case, you might get a disappointing answer. For us, we are satisfied.

I work with a services company and we work with a lot of different customers. So depending on which customer, what is that ecosystem, we'll end up using a lot of different BI tools. That includes both licensed and open-sourced software as well. For example, we've used Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

I am personally not involved in the implementation process, however, my understanding is it's not that difficult to set up.

I don't oversee day-to-day operations. I just have a team that does that for me.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing. Sometimes we, for example, resell some licenses. We are strategic partners with Microsoft. It entirely depends on how the contract with the customers is. Sometimes the customer procures all the licenses and gives them to us and sometimes we resell the licenses. It completely varies from customer to customer.

We have a strategic partnership with Microsoft and a lot of our customers also are Microsoft shops.

We use both cloud and on-prem deployments. It's a mixed kind of a situation, depending on the customer scenario and situation. We have some implementations that are on the cloud and there are some older installations, legacy installations, which are on-prem. That is also giving us an opportunity to move them to the cloud. Most of our customers are looking to move to the cloud slowly and gradually. I anticipate that we will be seeing more cloud-based installations going forward.

There are one-off scenarios where the customer has an interesting mix of cloud platforms. They might have an IoT platform that is deployed on AWS, and that data is coming to the data lake and being visualized using Power BI, however, not necessarily on Azure.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.