We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and SAP Analytics Cloud based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI is the winner in this comparison. Its users give it higher marks in the customer support category. SAP Analytics users are happier with the pricing, however.
"It has greatly improved our reporting capabilities."
"The solution is quite scalable."
"Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python."
"Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable."
"The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
"I think the visualization part is valuable."
"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"Data integration is very good."
"I like the product's capabilities. The clarity and scenarios are the main features that allow us to forecast using machine learning algorithms and make decisions."
"The features that I have found most valuable with SAP ERP products are their good user interface, stability, functionality, and good interface options."
"The user interface is quite good for developing reports out of models."
"The visualizations have been the most valuable feature."
"It is scalable."
"The most useful feature of SAP Analytics Cloud is planning because it helps users with making predictions and forecasts. Clients can forecast, make data allocations, and other actions. The solution is useful for planning."
"It's easy to connect Analytics Cloud with other SAP solutions, and it's also effortless to deploy. You don't need much technical skill to set it up. It's as easy as setting up a tablet. I said tablet before. It's very easy to actually set up."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"The one thing that I noticed specifically was the graphical features, and some of the analytical features. They were stronger on the Tableau side."
"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."
"There are some problems with the functionality of this solution. The dashboard is not very user friendly and is quite complicated."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"One thing I would like to have is the scripting language, as they already have within Excel. It's already within a Microsoft business product, because Excel is the number one business product out there. So it would be nice to have the scripting capability in order to automate certain processes."
"The solution could improve the extraction and transformation of data. For example, you transform the data and then send it to Microsoft BI without having to use your own API. We are only providing the API to Power BI, and then Power BI is doing the job."
"SAP has always had one problem with its products, they make them very closed systems that are difficult to integrate."
"Live Data Models are very slow and the setup can be improved, with tools such as Cloud Connector being inbuilt into SAP Analytics Cloud. Likewise, we need to write application code from scratch, rather than tweaking existing code, as we might with Excel macros. Moreover, when using responsive pages, the widgets get adjusted according to the mobile screen. As a result, when I place two or three KPI tiles, they can only be viewed tile-by-tile. We want to see the full dashboard on the mobile screen and zoom in to click on a particular section of the dashboard and go further into that. But displaying tile-by-tile makes it very annoying and the upper management using this dashboard might not be aware there are any more tiles to view."
"The customizations need to be better."
"However, there are areas of improvement, particularly in terms of visualization. The front-end interface of SAP Analytics Cloud is not as impressive as Tableau and Power BI. The charts in other solutions have a more visually appealing and customizable look, while in SAP Analytics Cloud, there's a lack of alignment between numbers and charts. This graphical aspect, especially concerning charts, is not as satisfactory in SAP Analytics Cloud compared to its counterparts."
"The business intelligence features should be improved because there is a lack of functionality regarding that part."
"The scope is limited to a few accounts."
"One potential improvement is how we can transpose data. With SAP, if you have data from one system with a declared data type and a different system with another data type, the transfer is tricky."
"SAP could add more templates to the platform."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while SAP Analytics Cloud is ranked 5th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 60 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while SAP Analytics Cloud is rated 8.0. 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 SAP Analytics Cloud writes "Good for reporting but needs to improve its predictive analytics features". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle Essbase, whereas SAP Analytics Cloud is most compared with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Tableau, IBM Planning Analytics, Anaplan and IBM Cognos. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. SAP Analytics Cloud report.
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