We performed a comparison between IBM Planning Analytics and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan, Oracle, Jedox and others in Business Performance Management."The flexibility of IBM Planning Analytics is a great feature of this solution. The design flexibility with data rules and defining calculations The ability to combine online and offline calculations are a benefit. Additionally, the forecasting features and predictive analytics is very good."
"All the different platforms are well integrated."
"The most valuable feature is that it is able to slice and dice the data."
"Planning Analytics' best features include automatic updates and slicing."
"The product's stability is good."
"It's a very stable, robust product."
"The most valuable features of IBM Planning Analytics for streamlining planning processes include a unified database where all data are centralized."
"A lot of the platform is in-memory, so Planning Analytics can run calculations quite fast. It also offers several user interfaces. And in the newest version of Planning Analytics, there is a new one called the Planning Analytics Workspace. Maybe it could be useful for the business side."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are the variety of possibilities to connect to various data sources. The visualizations are easily done, have useful rollover functions, and there are continuous updates being made to the system. You can benefit from the various improvements."
"There is continual improvement year-over-year."
"The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points."
"Management reporting solution that's very stable and scalable."
"The tool is very flexible so it allows creativity."
"I've seen no issues with BI's stability."
"Previously we used Excel, which took a long time - two or three weeks - to bring the data into a uniform format, whereas BI can do the same job in a day."
"Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."
"The tool's transport layer could be improved when promoting development between environments."
"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Planning Analytics could be improved by adding automation features."
"The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement."
"It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality."
"The new frontend Planning Analytics Workspace is not very good, it could be improved. I like the Planning Analytics functionality but it would be helpful if it could be more customizable. You can create a prediction and receive information but you cannot do feature engineering regarding the predictive models. If this was added it would be helpful."
"Adding predefined templates could be beneficial."
"It's wonky, and not super user-friendly with Excel."
"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."
"Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great."
"Actionable insights could be better."
"SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly."
"The admin view could be improved by making it more simplified to manage a users' activity and other things."
"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."
"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."
"Microsoft BI lacks some of the scheme features. It would be beneficial if there were a way to show how we move values in a different way."
IBM Planning Analytics is ranked 5th in Business Performance Management with 22 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. IBM Planning Analytics is rated 8.6, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Planning Analytics writes "Can easily create dashboards and helps businesses improve forecasting accuracy". 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)". IBM Planning Analytics is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Anaplan, Jedox, IBM Cognos and Oracle Hyperion, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE.
We monitor all Business Performance Management 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.
