We performed a comparison between Databricks and Microsoft BI based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Databricks is the winner in this comparison. It is robust, high performing, and received good feedback for its speed.
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient."
"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."
"The most valuable feature is the Spark cluster which is very fast for heavy loads, big data processing and Pi Spark."
"Databricks integrates well with other solutions."
"The load distribution capabilities are good, and you can perform data processing tasks very quickly."
"Databricks is a unified solution that we can use for streaming. It is supporting open source languages, which are cloud-agnostic. When I do database coding if any other tool has a similar language pack to Excel or SQL, I can use the same knowledge, limiting the need to learn new things. It supports a lot of Python libraries where I can use some very easily."
"The solution offers a free community version."
"I like the ability to use workspaces with other colleagues because you can work together even without seeing the other team's job."
"Two valuable most features are the ability to create columns and create measures."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is real-time report tracking."
"We have a lot of servers and applications from which we want reports, and it allows us to create reports from an SQL source or some other source."
"Its connection to every database: Whatever and wherever it is."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is the drill-through feature that takes you to a details page the users want to see."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"Databricks requires writing code in Python or SQL, so if you're a good programmer then you can use Databricks."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"The product needs samples and templates to help invite users to see results and understand what the product can do."
"It would be nice to have more guidance on integrations with ETLs and other data quality tools."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"It would be better if it were faster. It can be slow, and it can be super fast for big data. But for small data, sometimes there is a sub-second response, which can be considered slow. In the next release, I would like to have automatic creation of APIs because they don't have it at the moment, and I spend a lot of time building them."
"The interface of Databricks could be easier to use when compared to other solutions. It is not easy for non-data scientists. The user interface is important before we had to write code manually and as solutions move to "No code AI" it is critical that the interface is very good."
"I would like it if Databricks made it easier to set up a project."
"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."
"The initial installation is difficult."
"I feel the modeling page should be simplified."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"There are some connector-related issues in their MSBA solution."
"Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data."
"The smart phone application could be improved, along with better graphics and faster updating."
"It needs more graphics and overlays."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Alteryx, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and MicroStrategy.
We monitor all Data Science Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.