Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We mostly use Microsoft Power BI for reporting. We are going to build some solutions. We are going to deploy the scripts from Intune so that it can pull some data, which we can aggregate and show the projections on Power BI.

I really like the solution's integration part. You can integrate Microsoft Power BI with various other solutions like Intune. You can push the Intune data warehouse to Power BI. I really like the custom-built solutions that are available in Power BI.

I really wanted to send the inventory data to Power BI. I don't know whether the feature is available because I'm working on it and still need to look into it. The solution should increase the API functionality so that we can use Microsoft Power BI for other purposes and aggregate things.

I recently used Microsoft Power BI reporting for Windows Update. I wanted to understand where the reporting data came from, but I couldn't find it. It could be because I had fewer privileges. It would be good to know the data source for the solution's reporting part.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for the past six months.

I rate the solution’s stability ten out of ten.

Microsoft Power BI can be used by all company sizes because it's all about aggregating and visualizing data. Any organization needs to have a broader perspective on what is happening. It could be useful for both large and small applications. All ranges of companies can utilize Power BI.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten for scalability.

The support engineers are not ready to schedule the calls or understand the issues and are very eager to close the cases. I have previously worked at Microsoft as a support engineer. I know they may have workloads and may need to handle multiple cases in a day.

However, I'm not finding even the basic courtesy of handling the issues from the engineers' perspective. Except for a few, many engineers are not willing to help the customers. They focus more on their limitations, saying that they don't deal with such issues or that they are out of their scope.

I rate the solution’s technical support a six to seven out of ten.

Neutral

Informatica is a competitor to Microsoft Power BI. However, Microsoft Power BI is very easy to use, and even a nontechnical person can implement it. Other solutions are a bit complicated when compared to Microsoft Power BI.

The solution’s initial setup is very simple. The solution's deployment takes less than 15 to 30 minutes.

Microsoft Power BI is deployed on the cloud in our organization. I would recommend the solution to other users.

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

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.

I use the solution to visualize charts and graphs that provide data insights.

The product is user-friendly.

Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata.

I have been using the solution for a few months.

I rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten.

The tool is scalable. We can create multiple reports. We have two to three customers who use the solution. Within the client organizations, teams can use different solutions. It depends on the client’s needs.

Creating a report takes 10 to 30 minutes, based on our requirements. It is easy if we have simple requirements. If it is complex, building a report can take days. The product is cloud-based.

People use other tools in the market, like Tableau and Qlik Sense. They are good competitors.

I work in data management. I focus on connecting to the source and getting the metadata information from the tool. I'm interested in metadata, not actual data. Integration with other tools is possible. The solution provides APIs.

I will recommend the solution to others, but my recommendation depends on the clients. If a customer uses Microsoft products, they can use Power BI. If someone wants to build good reports and perform data analysis, Power BI is a good choice. Any dashboarding tool is good for data analysis. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

The solution is basically used for data. It's on a proprietary piece of equipment on which we collect data. We look at impurities in molten metal, and it's a database and it keeps track of all the batches that we have through the furnace that we have. It tells when it's dirty and stuff like that. It's a large database that we keep track of the history of all the ingots that we run.

The solution serves its purpose. When you have the recurring cost every year on this other project, Qlik Sense didn't fit with it as you'd have to have Qlik Sense plus something else. 

As long as you don't need the data in real-time, it's okay.

The solution is stable.

We have found the product to be scalable. 

We looked at it for these two new projects too, however, we needed more real-time data on this other project and so it wasn't a good solution and we thought Qlik Sense would work better.

If you need data in real-time, it's not an ideal solution.

I've dealt with the solution for about a year or so at this point.

From what I have seen, the solution seems to be very stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability of the product has been fine. We can expand it if we want to.

I've never contacted technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

We have more of an industrial type application and we're going to have Tulip interface with Qlik Sense or we're just going to use Domo's platform. Domo is more expensive, a little bit more expensive, however, one of my colleagues here already used Domo and he really liked it, so we're gearing towards Domo. We haven't purchased it yet.

We looked at Qlik Sense. However, when you have the recurring cost every year on this other project, Qlik Sense didn't fit with it because you'd have to have Qlik Sense plus something else.

Our corporate office may have some sort of agreement with Microsoft. We're just an end-user.

Corporate is kind of pushing Microsoft BI, and they have questions about using it for this project, however, we had an IT consultant that said it's not a good solution.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's not ideal for every application, however, it works pretty well.

Microsoft Power BI is a very powerful tool. It allows us to extract data from Excel or Share Point. 

We can send various project reports from the dashboard to management. It allows us to set up our own preferences. 

We can work with all sorts of data from the previous year or two. With that native data, we can have everything in one dashboard that accurately reflects the reporting. The visuals are great and make everything look very professional. We can change the look and feel or manipulate the data according to our requirements. It's extremely flexible. 

The solution has been very stable so far.

We find the product to be quite scalable. 

It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI. I'm not from the IT background, and I've been given the license to use the Power BI, however, I find that the support and video demos from Microsoft are not really helpful for me. I don't handle Microsoft BI 24/7. My working time isn't dedicated to using it and learning it. I need it for certain tasks and trying to wrap my head around it, while also handling other duties is difficult. There's too much of a learning curve for beginners.

The cost of the solution is high.

We originally started our migration back at the end of 2019. We've used it for a year or two now.

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

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem. 

Right now, in our organization, only 15 of us have the full license for the Power BI Pro. Not everyone in the office actually uses it. However, we have over 1,000 people using various other Microsoft products in our company.

As I am not technical, I did not handle the initial setup. We have IT personnel within our organization that handled it. I just gave them my laptop, and they just installed it for me. Occasionally, they can also do it remotely from their office to our office. I never touch it. We just open the apps from the desktop. The process, when do that way, i's quite convenient. It's quite easy for end-users.

We have our own IT team that handles the installation. They either take the laptop or do the installation remotely. In either case, it's handled in-house and not by integrators or consultants. 

The solution is quite expensive. 

I'm an end-user of the product, however, I'm not overly technical or in IT.

We have a custom Microsoft setup. We are using a few apps from Microsoft, such as the Microsoft Plan, and we are using Power BI, Power Automate, et cetera. It's all from Microsoft, and it is part of our IT infrastructure. When we combine it together, it is a project and portfolio management solution. It is not a commercial, off-the-shelf product. 

I'm not sure which version number we are using. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

In terms of Microsoft Power BI, for all people who need to do their own reporting or want to visualize their daily work or tasks, in terms of projection, giving others a view on what they are doing, it's a very good tool. It allows users to show projections of what we are doing. Users can grab statistics, which is quite convenient, and understand what they are doing from a visual perspective, which we find quite useful.

One of our primary use cases is to build an MSBA-based business intelligence solution for  collection agents, so that they can receive daily information relating to bills in the form of ledgers. I've built several packages to import the data from where it has been dumped. I then created the data mask for data analysis to showcase all the outputs and conclusions. As a result, there is a clear breakdown of total collections, the different parameters, customer-based information, and other essential information. We are partners of Microsoft BI and I'm a solutions architect.

The solution has helped increase the client's total sales revenue for their collection agent. It's basically MSBA, plus an AIML kind of solution and it helps the client to increase the overall efficiency of their collection agents, increasing total revenue for the company. 

The most valuable feature is the data flow related to the container and the control flow. Microsoft has recently introduced paginated reports in the status part. These are web-based and also mobile-based, depending upon the layout of the report. It can be easily printed in Word format as well as in layout format, regardless of size. 

There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution and there are certain features that Microsoft should include in the MSBA solution. One is the connective level problem that we currently face from the different data sources. It provides about 80% connectivity to all the data sources, but there is the remaining 20%. They could provide some kind of additional functionality which would make it a great solution. 

I've been using this solution for about 18 months. 

The solution is pretty stable in its current form, and we are working on the same platform to optimize and incorporate everything. 

This solution is fully configurable and totally scalable. We are currently expanding the solution to include the area collections managers, the territory collection managers, and the regional collection managers. There are currently close to 3,000 users who are field collection agents. There is a maintenance cost but it's pretty low because it's an on-premise solution, so there is no cost attached to the server-based maintenance. Our support team is responsible for maintenance.

The solution is currently used throughout the company although there are geographical restrictions. They plan to extend usage to a pan-country level. It will take some time to implement but we are at the end stages of deployment on the pan-country level. Once completed, we expect there will be around 15,000 users. 

We provide technical support as required by our clients. Urgent issues can be resolved within two or three hours. 

Microsoft BI is similar to Talent and Pentaho BI but Microsoft is more competitive and flexible over the other BI solutions. We can cover up or build our end-to-end solution from scratch and that includes reporting and we don't need to go to any kind of a visualization tool for that.

The initial setup was complex because the data vault was not totally structured and we needed to create some kind of a data lake, dump the data, then analyze it and create the data mask. We require certain validations and checks before importing or exporting the data as well as the application of the cubes to SSRS before reporting services. Deployment time can be dependent on the server and we have designed the system to optimize the process. We have a deployment team which can include two to three developers. Deployment takes about 10 minutes. The client decides on the deployment plan because they have applications that hang on the production server and don't want deployment to hamper other applications. 

Microsoft BI is provided as a BI solution to incorporate or implement all data in a single platform. It enables you to build a data mart for your company and analyze it on a single platform. Even data analysis techniques can be carried out on this platform, and output of data can be visualized from the SSRS reporting tool. In this solution, the ROI is quite high because collection has increased up to 25% in one month compared to the same month last year.

We have used a client-based service in the pricing. As yet, there are no additional costs. 

For anyone interested in building a BI solution from scratch, it's important to be aware that the data is not taken at a single platform. I believe that Microsoft BI is the best platform for this because it gives the flexibility to store the data into an SQL Server from different sources, and the ability to first dump your data into those servers. The analysis and reporting is in the same platform. Power BI has a much greater range than SSRS. Microsoft BI is a tool that gives it to you on a single platform, and you can build an end-to-end BI solution. This is not possible in Power BI. 

This solution gives me the total flexibility to use my skill set, in the technical forms and in the analysis form, in one go. I can do several things on a single platform regarding the data science, as well as the data analysis, pulling information, analyzing data, transforming data, creating data lakes, data warehouse, and data masks, all in a single platform. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

There are multiple use cases. I can't count them even on my fingers. There are around 20 to 30 solutions we have been deploying. We use it across finance, procurement, HR, engineering, and whatnot. Each of the domains we have touched. Data visualization is the main need of any organization. With Microsoft being in our ecosystem, Power BI works perfectly well for us.

The solution overall works quite well, especially if you have a Microsoft-heavy ecosystem.

The ease of creating the dashboard is quite good. 

The analytics are very strong when we couple it with Azure. It offers very good Big Data Analytics that work perfectly well. 

Scalability is not at all a problem. 

You can perform the role-based access perfectly. It gives you everything you need with a single sign-on authentication due to the fact that we are in the Microsoft environment.

You don't have to worry about security. That is very robust.

What matters most is the turnaround time to create a solution, which is quite fast. This is due to the fact that it's quite intuitive in nature. Even those new to the solution can create solutions very quickly. There isn't a high learning curve.

The initial setup was not difficult.

The pricing has been pretty good. 

Technical support is quite responsive.

Overall, the solution is quite intuitive.

If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization.

We've been using the solution for three and a half years at this point. We've definitely used it over the last 12 months.

The product is quite stable. It works well in the Microsoft environment. It doesn't crash or freeze. there are no bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The solution scales very well. If a company needs to expand its offering, it can do so easily. It's one of the selling points of the solution.

We have about 60 to 70 people on the solution currently.

We already are deployed it at a global level. It's just not India-based. We use it across our organization, and it is getting used a lot.

We've dealt directly with technical support. They have been responsive. We have called them multiple times and the response was good. We are quite satisfied with the level of service.

The initial setup was okay. We didn't have any problems. I wouldn't call it complex. I'd describe it more as straightforward. It took us around three or four months to set up and deploy the solution.

We have a yearly contract. We signed up for three years and that rolls over annually.

We have a bundle, an enterprise-level package. Its pricing is good for us.

We did evaluate Tableau for a moment, however, due to the existing license of Microsoft, the default choice was Power BI.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I can't recall the exact version number.

It's one of the leaders in the top data visualization and analytics toolsets. I'd advise other companies to go for it. It's stable, scalable, and a powerful product and it comes very handy when you want to create visualizations very fast. It's a go-to product if you want to go for data visualization and reporting.

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