Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Microsoft Power BI gives a true self-service tool to the user. The IT team can focus on ensuring that the database is in a good place. It is also in the cloud, which makes it easy for mobile access of reports and data. 

The business users have taken to Microsoft BI like a duck to water. It requires a low amount of training. Users already using Excel can generate new reports and dashboards within minutes.

• Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. 
• Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great. 

None.

None.

They are fabulous.

The previous products include Tableau, Cognos, BusinessObjects, and Sisense. All of them have high price tags! Why pay and get ripped off for these products when you have Power BI? It will give you just as much, growing every month at an acceptable cost model.

Want to waste a lot of money? Then go for the others, I can recommend BusinessObjects as a great way to burn your money.

Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes. I can read a number of databases including a good old Excel spreadsheet. 

Internal Team. It is that easy. However, we did get a third party to do the training to key users for us. The course was tailored to our business. 

Paid for itself in the first month. 

Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer! 

Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? 

Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost. 

Love that fact that we have a great development team that is moving the product forward every month. 

SSRS and the Tabular server/Vertipaq engine/DAX are probably the two most valuable components, leaving out SQL Server (and Azure versions of it, including the Azure warehouse and big data technologies). SSRS's display functionality is resoundingly flexible, and by comparison to other vendors, relatively easy to learn. SSAS Tabular performs very well with modest effort in design, and the ability to perform complex business modeling through DAX calculations stands out in a crowd.

Microsoft BI really entails a whole catalog of products. The relative ease with which these products work together is where the primary value comes into play. When you buy SQL Server Enterprise, you automatically have access to SSAS, which can handle Tabular or multidimensional cubes and data mining, SSIS offering a pretty comprehensive integration toolset, SSRS, covering just about any paginated and subscription-based reporting, and of course all of the in-built features of SQL Server, the individual useful features of which there are too many to spout out here. Each of these components work well enough in isolation, or as part of a larger ecosystem with other vendors, but together are a well-integrated machine that can handle end-to-end needs on the entire lifecycle of data. Being one of the more popular vendors, Microsoft products are also the first compatibility for other vendors' products. The breadth of products do a fine job at enabling the delivery of data and insights to the right people, in the right format, at the right time. Doing so efficiently/quickly is where a huge amount of value comes in. Many other enterprise vendors are capable, but are either slower to execute, more work to maintain, cost much more to find talent and skills for, or some combination of all of the above.

No product is perfect, and the Microsoft stack is no exception. The first things that come to mind are Microsoft's recent shift in strategy to focus on cloud first. While this makes sense for them, it leaves the on-premise products lagging in support and new features, while the vast majority of users (mid to large corporations) are still using on-premise solutions and/or are cloud-averse. For example, the announcement that the pricing model for Power BI would change, simultaneously rolling out both Power BI Premium and Power BI Report Server created a great deal of confusion for people who were very enthusiastic about the product. The failures to address concerns with the speed and nature of the changes were felt by users across the spectrum, and it was a situation created by their cloud-first strategy. Similarly, if you look at the tried and true on-premise options for data processing, interfacing with emerging technologies, especially big data technologies, lags behind. This is considerably less true for Azure users, but that is specifically a cloud offering, which again, many corporate entities are not yet ready to embrace.

It's easy to think of BI as only the visualization aspect of data, and that point of contact between users and data is absolutely where the rubber meets the road in BI. In reality, there are a whole stack of tools and concepts behind the visualization that enable that interaction - from security, data governance, integration, performance, network and infrastructure, and automation... there are many facets to BI as a system. The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack. The PowerBI visualization experience is underwhelming in almost every way compared to many alternatives.

Another difficulty is navigating the many products within the suite. There are many components, and each component has many versions. Dealing with feature and compatibility issues with so many versions of so many products can be very frustrating at times. Microsoft does not do itself any favors on this front with the way they name their products. "PowerBI", for example, could be in reference to the desktop design tool, a cloud-based service for publishing and administering data models (which comes with three distinctively different pricing models, the features of which are different and not interchangable), or an on-premise server solution replacing SSRS. You'll make yourself dizzy looking at the Azure services offered. The good news is the sky's the limit, the bad news is you'll have to navigate some pretty cloudy areas to make heads or tales of what to actually use.

Four years, using largely SQL Server 2012 and related versions/components.

In general, no. Most stability issues encountered have been more related to network or infrastructure, and not the products being used.

As with any system, good design is paramount. I have certainly run into times when performance suffers, or changes and enhancements are slow and expensive. In every case, redesign has solved the issues. As hardware improves, and the many options (especially in the Azure and big data space) continue to evolve, designing for scale has become easier and easier. One of the difficulties that naturally occurs in this ecosystem is simply knowing how to design with so many options that can potentially do the same or similar task.

I have experienced mixed results on this front. We have had some very available and supportive account reps at times, and other times not so much. My biggest complaint would have to be that the disorganization from Microsoft's side makes the results on this front inconsistent.

Depends on which components we are talking about. For reference, however, I don't think there is a single Microsoft component that was as painful as any given Oracle component to work with.

Do your homework when deciding what components to leverage. The worst thing you can do is try to use them all. The gamut of products under the Microsoft BI banner enables every form of BI - choose the ones that serve your specific purposes, and leave the rest on the table until a new need arises.

We use Microsoft Power BI to budget for all departments and to compare the balance of the past month.

The accounting data needs improvement. 

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for a year. 

It is a stable solution. 

Ten users are using the solution. 

The initial setup is complex. 

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. 

The solution is very powerful and very flexible. 

It is very easy to set up and you can connect it to multiple systems very easily.

They keep on upgrading, performance-wise. 

Power BI is very fast; they have improved Power BI a lot in general over time. YOu can see the difference. 

The stability is great and continues to get better and better.

The pricing is pretty good.

They should provide some kind of extra visual. There are a lot of third-party companies that provide these visuals, however, it would be better if, instead of relying on a third party, they could have their own. We should have by default in the package itself, some good visuals.

Technical support could be a bit better.

The performance could be enhanced in the sense that there is a limitation of the volume of data that it can hold. 

While they have some different options out there, they did not improve anything when you connect to any dataset, when you have to import. You need to connect online, meaning live.  

You cannot create so many things on the Power BI side, such as adding a new column, which is not possible in your live reporting, direct query option. In contrast, with the import method, you can do so many things. They need to improve on the direct query option side.

The product is stable. I have seen a lot of improvements in the stability of their application lately. If you compare what's available now to the last three to four years back, you can see it's more stable.

It's scalable and it scales quickly. Nowadays, being on the cloud, expanding is very easy.

While support is okay, they need to improve it a lot. Of course, they're improving as we speak, yet, I would say, if you can ask me the ratings, I would still say it's still rather low and good - not great.

I'm also familiar with SAP, which doesn't scale as well. SAP also is much more expensive. SAP is a big product, whereas Microsoft BI is much smaller. They only overlap in terms of the analytics cloud and the SAP goes above and beyond and offers many, many more things. 

The pricing is fair. They give you many options by splitting up the licensing. They have multiple types of licenses out there based on your usage. You can increase your pricing if you use it a bit more, however, it's still quite reasonable as compared to SAP. 

We are a customer and end-user. We are not a Microsoft (or SAP) partner.

I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for reporting around data migration.

BI provides us with strong computing power and calculations with quality visibility which helps with the whole pipeline.

I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs.

BI also allows us to make functional dashboards, perform queries, and display data in various ways. And, there are always new features being released.

I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in.

I have been using BI on and off for the past two years.

Stability is very good.

This solution is scalable.

I have not needed to contact support.

Originally, we were only using Excel, trying out different dashboards for the data. This was not powerful enough for us. It was not easy to use or streamline so we made the switch.

The initial setup was straightforward and deployment took about a week plus another few weeks to do work within the BI.

Our deployment was performed by our in-house team of one.

There is a free version of the Power BI which may be worth looking into for small teams prior to purchasing a license. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I mostly work in the oil and gas industry. Microsoft BI is primarily associated with surveillance, optimization, product, and forecasting-related items. While I am not currently using Microsoft BI, I have prior experience, and in my current position, I am guiding the team on a larger scale. I don't use it myself frequently, but I am the lead for that team, and when I do use it, I use it for reporting purposes.

Microsoft BI has a multitude of additional features. Overall it's an EDA tool, from which you can extract, transform, and load data. You can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources.

When I compare other analytical tools to Microsoft BI, I believe Microsoft BI is far more accurate, and the frequency is also better.

It has additional features, which are very much useful. The most important thing I like is that it is just a data platform connecting to the overall process and it can be utilized in any sector.

Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included. When we use engineering models linked to Microsoft BI or Salesforce, the engineering models are from a third-party application.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for the last three and a half years.

We are using the latest update.

I have used it both on-premises and on the cloud.

In terms of stability, I have seen some cases where it is difficult as well as some cases where it is very easy. Overall, it is a stable and reliable product.

It is easy to scale Microsoft BI.

We have a larger team. Microsoft BI specifically, is not limited to any subset or any team. I believe we have 1,000 plus users in my company currently who are using this application.

I have been in touch with the technical team, but not specifically for Microsoft BI. Based on my experience with Microsft technical support, I would rate them a four out of five.

Technical support is pretty decent.

I use a variety of tools, including Salesforce, and I have developed a number of Python-based tools.

The initial setup was simple. However, when I did it the first time, it was complex. Once I understood the process it was simple.

My field was small due to the type of setup required. I scheduled it for one week, during which we also tested.

Definitely, it requires maintenance in terms of quality checking of the data, as well as whether or not the run times or schedules are working properly.

I had some assistance when I deployed the first time, but I am now able to complete the deployment on my own.

In terms of licensing, I've never worked on the contractual side of their license. However, I believe that the number of licenses currently in use is appropriate for our organization. It also adds value to the team. I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable.

I have not used it on the mobile app. I'm not sure how Microsoft BI works on a mobile app. 

Mobile apps are sometimes third-party apps that are difficult to configure and use. As a result, mobile apps are something that will be required in the future, upcoming data transformation.

Before implementing Microsoft BI or any other analytical tool, we must first understand the domain. Basically, how the data is linked, what data you want to transform, and what output you need for the finished product. Then you proceed with your deployment in a sequential manner. It will be very simple.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. I haven't explored many other items that are feasible or possible, or the analytical part of Microsoft BI's functionality, which I haven't personally used, so there's a gap. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

We have many use cases, from creating full ETL workloads for supporting some dashboards to only building dashboards by themselves. For example, there is one stage where we had to do some data integration from several sources to assess the quality of the data that we are consuming for our projects. We had to ingest data and convert it using Power BI, which is useful but isn't the best ETL tool, and I understand that that is not its purpose. Finally, we built out a schema model and built reports upon that. It's a full project. 

We also have another project, where we are attempting to do some incremental refresh because we are ingesting a lot of data from lake sources and SQL sources. We are doing direct query and applying some optimization from Synapse.

I am currently using the latest version of Power BI.

The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything.

Something that everyone has suggested and that we are currently implementing and testing is the ability to export tables with the same format. That is something many customers were seeking, and right now it is possible to do that. Focusing on table support is a huge opportunity.

One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.

When you try to process a lot of data from one million records, it breaks. The computer runs out of CPU and memory. It's terrible, but I know it's not its main purpose, so that would be my suggestion.

It's stable, but the desktop is not so stable. I have experienced several crashes. I would say there is a lot of opportunity for improvement on that.

A couple of people are needed for deployment and maintenance. You always need a developer who is proficient on Power Query and maybe some other DevOps guy who sets up the pipeline. So, maybe two people at most. It's very easy.

Scalability on the ETL side is not so good. When you run the workloads on service, you can fail almost anything, but it's not exactly the best for scaling.

On the virtualization side, I would say it's good.

I haven't actually needed much technical support. I know there are forums and people respond, but I haven't really sought that out. There is so much documentation online, there are books online, and there are YouTube channels from guys that provide solutions to issues and to some other stuff. The community is very proficient.

It is very easy. Even non-IT professionals use it and deliver value to the company.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is to just jump right into it, download the Power BI desktop and start looking at YouTube channels. There are lots of people who have made wonderful things on YouTube.

Compared to Cognos, Tableau and Power BI are pretty fast. 

The initial setup is very quick. Connectivity, installation, and configuration are pretty fast and seamless compared to Cognos. Power BI eradicated dependency on a framework model. 

Power BI is cheaper than Tableau and Cognos.  Power BI Desktop comes free and the Pro license is $10 per month whereas Tableau desktop would cost you $70 per month. Cognos is mostly suited for large and medium size companies 

For someone who is new, I think that Power BI can be a little complicated. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Power BI a rating of seven.