We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions."
"We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly."
"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice."
"I liked that Microsoft Power BI handles a large amount of data. I can handle hundreds of rows from Postgres in a few minutes. I also like how it detects the relationship between the tables without explicitly saying that. It just detects the relationship automatically. That made it easier to work with the data."
"Implementation is very quick and the solution is very user-friendly."
"The stability is great and continues to get better and better."
"I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."
"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."
"One of the most valuable features of SQL Server is that it's easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is easy installation. It was very easy to install."
"The security and vulnerability management are well-managed through the vendor."
"The pricing of the product is very good."
"It's a very capable, efficient, price-performant OLAP server."
"Most valuable features include: high availability, clustering, save backup and recovery."
"We have many users, between 50 and 100 using the SQL Server product."
"Tuning Advisor suggests where to add indexes and from where to remove them. It works like an adviser."
"The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"Microsoft needs to do some more research and development to make it more stable."
"It would be nice to use other connectors to link with the data."
"Microsoft is behind IBM when it comes to security features."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"It's not user-friendly; more tutorials, training, and better documentation would be helpful."
"I would like to see integration with Excel."
"The solution is expensive. The licensing costs are high."
"For small-scale businesses, Microsoft could improve by removing some limits in SQL Express."
"Microsoft doesn't have active-active load balancing scenarios. It's always a failover cluster."
"The UX design of this system needs improvement."
"Running multiple instances on the same box would be beneficial."
"The solution's stability can be improved."
"Its support for JSON should be improved. It does support JSON, but the support is not good enough currently. They should also improve the way indexes work. Its performance can also be improved because sometimes it becomes very slow for certain table designs. It cannot have more than a certain amount of data. As compared to other databases, its capability to handle large volumes of data is not very good."
"In the next releases, I would only like more enhanced backups and more restore points."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. 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 SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and IBM Db2 Database.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools 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.
