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.
"Databricks' most valuable features are the workspace and notebooks. Its integration, interface, and documentation are also good."
"The solution's features are fantastic and include interactive clusters that perform at top speed when compared to other solutions."
"I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature."
"The solution offers a free community version."
"It's great technology."
"In the manufacturing industry, Databricks can be beneficial to use because of machine learning. It is useful for tasks, such as product analysis or predictive maintenance."
"Databricks is based on a Spark cluster and it is fast. Performance-wise, it is great."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"Tech support is very helpful."
"The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones. The visualization is also very good. In terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities."
"The product is stable."
"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"
"Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly."
"This solution has improved our ability in making decisions and explaining data."
"We like the drag and drop interactability visualization. We really like that. It's user-friendly."
"The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time. It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet."
"We'd like a more visual dashboard for analysis It needs better UI."
"Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present."
"Would be helpful to have additional licensing options."
"The query plan is not easy with Databrick's job level. If I want to tune any of the code, it is not easily available in the blogs as well."
"Some of the error messages that we receive are too vague, saying things like "unknown exception", and these should be improved to make it easier for developers to debug problems."
"Databricks' performance when serving the data to an analytics tool isn't as good as Snowflake's."
"Implementation of Databricks is still very code heavy."
"I would like to see the integration between Databricks and MLflow improved. It is quite hard to train multiple models in parallel in the distributed fashions. You hit rate limits on the clients very fast."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
"The smart phone application could be improved, along with better graphics and faster updating."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "
"The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version."
"SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."
"There are certain features that are only available in the cloud version. It would be beneficial if they could be brought down to the on-premise version without the necessity of using the enterprise SQL database, as that can be very costly. We need more cost-effective features that are available in the cloud to be accessible on-premise."
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 Data Science Studio, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Alteryx, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and IBM Cognos.
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.
