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.
"We have the ability to scale, collaborate and do machine learning."
"It is a cost-effective solution."
"The time travel feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is its notebook. It's quite convenient to use, both terms of the research and the development and also the final deployment, I can just declare the spark jobs by the load tables. It's quite convenient."
"The fast data loading process and data storage capabilities are great."
"The solution is an impressive tool for data migration and integration."
"There are good features for turning off clusters."
"This solution offers a lake house data concept that we have found exciting. We are able to have a large amount of data in a data lake and can manage all relational activities."
"They find Power BI's data pull mechanism to be sufficient and cost-effective, especially considering the stability it provides. In comparison with other solutions, Power BI stands out as a fantastic choice. Therefore, I would definitely recommend sticking with the Pro license."
"We can see that it's really improved the way end users can do their own graphs and pick their own fields of information and present that in a nice way."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable."
"Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured."
"The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools."
"We'd like a more visual dashboard for analysis It needs better UI."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"There are no direct connectors — they are very limited."
"The initial setup is difficult."
"Scalability is an area with certain shortcomings. The solution's scalability needs improvement."
"I would like it if Databricks made it easier to set up a project."
"I would like to see more documentation in terms of how an end-user could use it, and users like me can easily try it and implement use cases."
"The solution has some scalability and integration limitations when consolidating legacy systems."
"Capacity could be improved."
"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."
"The mobile app is very poor."
"I think that there should be visuals for financial reporting videos. It should just be a plug and play because there is a lot of coding that goes into it with different clients."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"The upgrade process could be improved."
"One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel."
"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."
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 SAS Visual Analytics.
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.