We performed a comparison between IBM Watson Explorer and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Mining solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"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."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."
"It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"The best feature for me is Power Query. I know that probably sounds strange, but you can't do too much with visuals and reports if the backend stuff is horribly dirty and just bad. But for me, that is absolutely fantastic. I can load the data and do the transformation and be able to load it in a useful way. There are tons of connections, which is absolutely fantastic as well. It's been fairly easy, and it's intuitive."
"Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data."
"The interface is very easy to use."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary"
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"The solution is expensive."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"here are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs."
"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."
"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."
"Its performance and stability can be improved. It takes time to load, and sometimes, it also breaks down for the whole region. Its usability could also be better, and it could also have more connections with different data sources."
"Microsoft Power BI can be confusing, because it has two languages that you need to learn if you want to use it, and this makes it more difficult for nontechnical users."
"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."
Earn 20 points
IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 9th in Data Mining while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". 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)". IBM Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics and Tableau, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE. See our IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
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