We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Plotly based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Reporting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly."
"I think the visualization part is valuable."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results."
"Microsoft BI is scalable."
"This is a self-service BI tool, so it doesn't require a huge amount of technical training, knowledge, or a background in BI in order to induct new people into it."
"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."
"The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools."
"It is a scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine to ten out of ten."
"When reviewing and interpreting data, I typically examine it in a tabular form to understand its structure. However, when explaining or presenting the findings to others, I often use visualization tools such as Plotly. These tools allow me to create visual representations of datasets."
"The level of interactivity that the product provides is valuable to me."
"Microsoft has made a lot of progress with Power BI in the past couple of years, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, Integration is one area they could work on. They are adding more integration with other Microsoft tools, but I would like it if they sped up the process."
"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."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable."
"The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"The integration with third-party products could be more stable."
"Defining a relationship was very confusing. There were circular directions for which I had to do a lot of adjustments in the data. They can do something to make it easier."
"The solution cannot be deployed on the website and shared with others through its own platform."
"I believe that the prices of the tool's paid services could be on the premium side, so the pricing model can be considered for improvement."
"The tool needs to improve its pie charts. Regarding Plotly, I find the online documentation somewhat challenging to navigate, especially when dealing with many parameters. Searching through thousands of parameters can be a tedious and less straightforward process. While the documentation is available online and serves its purpose, I often encounter difficulties in finding the information."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 297 reviews while Plotly is ranked 16th in Reporting with 3 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while Plotly is rated 7.6. 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)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Plotly writes "An interactive and easy-to-use solution that can be used to create dashboards". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Plotly is most compared with Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, RStudio Connect and Qlik Sense. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. Plotly report.
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We monitor all Reporting 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.
