Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Microsoft Power BI gives a true self-service tool to the user. The IT team can focus on ensuring that the database is in a good place. It is also in the cloud, which makes it easy for mobile access of reports and data. 

The business users have taken to Microsoft BI like a duck to water. It requires a low amount of training. Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes.

• Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. 
• Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great. 

None.

None.

They are fabulous.

The previous products include Tableau, Cognos, BusinessObjects, and Sisense. All of them have high price tags! Why pay and get ripped off for these products when you have Power BI? It will give you just as much, growing every month at an acceptable cost model.

Want to waste a lot of money? Then go for the others, I can recommend BusinessObjects as a great way to burn your money.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes. I can read a number of databases including a good old Excel spreadsheet. 

Internal Team. It is that easy. However, we did get a third party to do the training to key users for us. The course was tailored to our business. 

Paid for itself in the first month. 

Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer! 

Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? 

Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost. 

Love that fact that we have a great development team that is moving the product forward every month. 

During my internship, I used Microsoft Power BI to create reports for a project we were working on. I also made a dashboard to help a company grow its business.

What I liked most about the tool is that we can use text queries to create projects and modify columns according to our needs. There are hundreds of YouTube courses on how to use it. 

I found data cleaning in the solution to be quite difficult. If I could add a feature, I'd include Excel's Flash Fill function. This allows you to set a formula for one row and column and automatically apply it to thousands of rows, making data sorting much easier.

I found the tool to be a stable product. One of my favorite features is connecting a SQL database to the tool to generate real-time reports. I was part of a group of 80+ students, but only five of us, including me, were offered internships and could use Microsoft Power BI.

I haven't contacted the solution's support yet. 

Installing Power BI is easy—there are free and paid versions available. I used the free version, which you can download from the Microsoft Store and install, similar to installing an app on your phone.

I used the tool's free version. 

I'd recommend Microsoft Power BI for report generation - it's great software. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use it for data modeling, joining data from different data sources, and visualizing dashboards and reports for end-users and business process owners in the company.

The various different ETL tools within it and the ability to have different data refreshes and scheduled refreshes [real-time data refresh capabilities] have most significantly improved the data analysis processes.

Power BI is easy to adopt. It's quite easy to roll out into the business for end-users, and the functionality for modeling and such is quite extensive for the data department.

It has connected to quite a few different things. We use the Microsoft stack, so it's fairly connected.

Better structure and stability in terms of licensing and capacity. Microsoft is changing things with Microsoft Fabric and how it's impacting different functionality for premium users, capacity users, and pro users. So, that's where licensing could be improved.

I have been using it since it came out. It's been many years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten.  

Sometimes, updates can cause data refresh issues.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. 

There are 100 end users in my organization. We use it daily. 

It takes a while to get the issue described, looked into, and resolved. It's a lot of troubleshooting and "try this, try that," rather than acknowledging that they've had this issue elsewhere. There doesn't seem to be a joined-up approach for people experiencing similar issues and how to resolve them.

Neutral

I have used various different modeling tools and BI tools. 

We used Tableau before, and general Excel modeling, etc.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy. 

It's cloud-based.

Initially, it's quite straightforward. It depends on how you want it set up, like with gateway refreshes, etc.

Just more visibility for end-users to use and interact with data.

I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

To gain insights into our sales and financial aspects, we use the Power BI solution, which provides us with valuable information and analytics.

One of the most valuable aspects of this tool is its ease of use and the ability to easily share information with others.

There is room for improvement in terms of pricing for the solution.

We use Microsoft BI in our organization. I have been working with it for two years.

We have implemented the Power BI Pro solution in our organization.

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten.

I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

We have plans to increase our usage in the future.

I would rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

We use fast track support and it is very good.

I have been acquainted with SolarCloud for three months.

I haven't worked directly with the solution, but I downloaded the eBook to learn more about it.

Due to our extensive experience with the tool, the initial setup was straightforward and uncomplicated.

We have seen a return on investment.

The pricing for the solution is relatively higher compared to other alternatives.

I am a cybersecurity analyst.

Knowing the numbers and having comprehensive insights are important for our organization. It holds significant importance for various teams, including finance and other departments, to make informed decisions and drive overall growth and success.

I would rate Microsoft BI a ten out of ten.

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI a seven out of ten.

I mainly use it for sales analysis. We are in the telecom industry, so on a daily basis, we see a couple of trends in the number of activations of customers and registration, the performance of the dealer, and items like that.

Its integration with the Microsoft Office Suite is great. I can easily connect it to any of the Excel or any CSV files, and I can immediately create a dashboard. 

It's like the higher level of pivot tables. For the people who mainly use Excel, this is like an advanced version. This is much more flexible and I don't have to train people to use it, as it's very user-friendly compared to Qlik. Qlik needs some expertise and a layman cannot immediately go to Qlik and do stuff unless he understands it. When it comes to Power BI it's a five minutes tutorial, he can definitely understand what needs to be done.

The solution is stable and scalable. So far I don't have any issues, however, it depends on the amount of data we use. I'm just running it on my PC.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is free as it's bundled with Office 365.

Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik. 

They could also improve the mobile experience. If people are using this mobile app for BI, they need better performance there. The rendering of the objects, for example, if you create the dashboard on Power BI when someone sees that on the app, it comes in a different format. They can do some enhancements there to standardize it.

Once we expand it as a centralized repository, if I could find much more use cases, that would be ideal. However, now it's very limited in our organization.

We don't use the solution filly and don't yet have a license for it. That said, I've had the chance to work with it for more than a year now.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and we don't have any trouble with it crashing or freezing. It's reliable and the performance is good. 

My understanding is that the solution is scalable. 

I can easily load a billion rows in less than two or three minutes and play around with it. However, I haven't tested on big data files or anything like that.

Right now, we don't have too many users. It's just three to four people as of now, as our primary BI tool is still Qlik Sense. It's only for ad hoc use cases we use Power BI, and just myself and a couple of team members, as well as the BI specialist, that access it.

I've never reached out to technical support in the past. If I run into issues, I tend to Google solutions to find answers to my questions. YouTube is also a good resource if you need information.

We currently use Qlik Sense as our BI product.

The initial setup is not complex or difficult. It's simple and straightforward. 

It took, 10 to 15 minutes, if I remember correctly, to set everything up. It's just a .exe file installing. It's not hard and it's pretty fast.

We did not need a consultant or an integrator to handle the implementation. I just played around a bit with it.

We don't have a license on Power BI, so we don't publish anything. It's mainly for some ad hoc use cases that we use Power BI format.

Power BI is free; it comes with Office 365.

I've currently looked at MicroStrategy and am in the process of comparing a few other products.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

We are using Power BI, however, not to the full scale. It's still unlicensed as of now, and I'm using desktop versions only.

I don't remember the version, as it comes with Office 365. I didn't give a thought to the version.

From my experience with the desktop version, I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

From my experience, I'd recommend the solution to others. 

I take care of business transformations in the company, which includes solution transformation, and so on. We have a range of products that are legacy products. They are fairly old. We are substituting them with new age products, and one of them is Power BI. We are using its latest version currently.

The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones. The visualization is also very good. In terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities.

Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization.

It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years. 

Its scalability is good. The only issue is the performance that degrades when more data comes in, but when it comes to scalability within a particular level of data, it is really good.

I don't know. I am not technically so much involved in the day-to-day side of this.

The initial setup is a process by itself, so we have to take external help in terms of implementation. In terms of various reports and other things, I don't have an idea about the complexity of the implementation because we took expert advice, and an external consultant implemented it for us. I would guess that it is a bit extensive and needs a lot of work to be usable.

I would definitely recommend Power BI for those entities that are not complex. Unless and until there is a very high volume to be handled, I believe Microsoft Power BI is the best solution to go for, particularly when somebody buys a stack of Microsoft products, which includes Office, SharePoint, and so on. The whole Microsoft Office Suite is a brilliant product in its entirety, and there is good and easy integration with SharePoint, etc. This is a nice feature that other products don't have. There is a stack of IBM as well, but it is not as good as Microsoft.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. I am pretty happy with this solution, and the two points are down because of the performance issue and probably the cost.

Enterprise reporting and digitization of dashboards using Microsoft Power BI, SSRS and Azure Reporting DB by integrating several applications to establish single version of truth.

Microsoft BI stack is very easy to use and most of the developer versions are free such as Power BI, DAX, SQL Server Development Edition. This helped us quick prototyping to generate value of data resting in silos. 

What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel. It is very compatible with Excel tools, and anybody who works with Excel can learn and use Power BI quickly. 

Writing formulas and data transformation are good features.

The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version of Power BI. They should have versions for both Apple and Unix because you cannot install the desktop version for these operating systems.

In the future, I would like to see them add more AI and machine learning features, as well as self-service analytics.

You can use R and Python, but it would be helpful if they had some no-code machine learning options that you find in other tools.

The UI/UX can be improved. Products such as Tableau and QlikView are very good in terms of the user interface.

I have been using Microsoft BI for five years, on and off.

I have not found any issues with respect to stability. Microsoft has invested a lot and they are continuing to invest in Power BI.

Given that there is a server version for services that can be used to implement and roll out reports at the organizational level, it's scalable.

In my current organization, I am training 15 people on how to use it and I am looking to expand to 50 users.

Microsoft support is quick. We also have a dedicated partner for support, and they are good.

Positive

Prior to incorporate Power BI in the stack, we were using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services(SSRS) only. They do not have any visualization interface, but you can do static reporting. This is the reason that we are switching. Probably, we will use SSRS and Azure SQL at the backend, but there won't be used as the visualization tool.

For visualization, we used to use Excel. Which not reliable. 

The installation is easy. The download takes perhaps five minutes, depending on the bandwidth. Overall, it can be downloaded and installed within half an hour and no training is required.

The desktop version is used for development and the cloud version is used to submit a report. Essentially, it is Power BI Desktop and Power BI Services. The desktop version is what is on-premises.

You can deploy yourself but of course, in an office, you require an administrator.

The cost of this product is very low, at approximately $8 or $9 per month for a developer. It is the cheapest of all of the visualization tools. They have a 30-day trial available for you to try it.

For personal use, this product is free to use.

Tableau is a little bit expensive, although it is good if they want a very sophisticated solution. Both Tableau and QlikView are a little better in terms of the user interface.

You need a technical team to operate the solution. You need people for the administration of the data connection and data integration. They should be skilled in SQL, data management, and so forth. Typically, these are data engineers.

We plan to continue using Microsoft BI. We are onboarding and implementing organization-wide for our long-term strategy, and the entire organization will be using Power BI.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is easy to learn, especially for somebody who is good at Excel. Other tools are easy to use as well but if you are a Windows user then Power BI is a good option.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.