Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We are using it for analyzing transactions. In the products that we develop and supply to our customers, there are some applications that are connected to payments. We analyze the trend of transactions or payments that are done in our system by our clients. We want to understand how our clients are using our solution and if there are some conditions that are making them use our product more than others. We also analyze who is paying and how much, and how and at what time are they using our system.

It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. 

It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs. 

When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing.

Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue.

It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable enough.

It is easy to make it grow as a product. Our organization is not big. We have a total of 10 to 15 people who access this solution. We will continue to use it for sure. 

In general, we are producing applications that we sell to our clients in a SaaS model. All data of our clients is inside our database. The clients have to manage the service. All this data that they are loading in our server can have interesting information for them. So, we are using it to understand our clients and the behavior of the user.

We had to use some support for licensing. They were fast enough, but sometimes, they were not very clear. We had a few calls with them. In the end, they solved the problem, but they didn't have a very clear approach. It was more of a communication problem. Their support can be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. 

Its installation is easy on the cloud as well as on the desktop. You can also easily move and publish from desktop to the cloud. We had issues with licensing, but after you have received licenses, it is easy. 

It is also good how the data that is being collected on some servers for different data centers is automatically synchronized. It is easy enough to do automatic scaling or collect the data from the source and the publisher.

We did it ourselves. At the moment, we are not using a consultant. It is intuitive enough for our use, and there is one type of analysis and one type of role. However, in the future, we might require a consultant for customizing the dashboard and the reports and splitting the data according to different roles. We would require analysis of different roles based on different sets of data. For machine learning, we'll surely require a consultant.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have three or four people for each specific competency. Some of them are more experienced in the data that has to be collected, and some of them are experienced in how data can be collected from the in-house server. There are also some people who are more competent in the business domain.

We pay for users who are publishing on the cloud. The desktop version is free.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution. It has many features that are good. It mostly needs improved licensing. 

I would rate Power BI a nine out of ten. 

It is for dashboards and reports. 

It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured.

They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is reasonably stable.

In my organization, we have around ten users. In our client's organization, we have about 100 users.

I normally find whatever I need in Microsoft documentation or through Google. There is a lot of activity in the market. A lot of other people typically would have already asked the same question that I have, so it is fairly easy to find information.

I didn't really use any other product. I used to be a Qlik partner, and I became a Microsoft partner two years ago.

Its installation is straightforward. The developer suite has one-click installation. The end-users just get a web URL. There is no installation for end-users. They just access it.

There is a Microsoft certification that you need to complete, but it is all deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud. So, there are no infrastructure requirements.

It depends upon the tier of your Office 365 subscription. On E5, which is a Microsoft Azure subscription, you get it for free. If you are on a lower tier, you can subscribe for $10 a month per user, which is really cheap.

I would recommend this solution. It is pretty good. Technically, it is at the same level as the other products that I've used so far. It has all the features, and it is easy to deploy. Its costs are really palatable. They are improving it all the time. I am fairly satisfied with this product.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten. There are always areas for improvement, but I am fairly happy with it. I would not rate anything else also higher than seven.

We are using Power BI Premium at the moment. It is an online solution, which always has the latest version.

It is for data visualization and data insights. BI means business intelligence, so it helps you understand the performance of your business better. It gives you deeper insight into the data so that you can draw meaningful conclusions from the data, and your decisions are based on data insights rather than a hunch. 

It is a good and very useful product. I find it to be extremely useful because it gives me a deeper insight into my business, and it lets me analyze things and make decisions based on the data.

The way data is presented is very valuable. The amount of information that we can get at a glance is also valuable. You can then drill-down and see data from many different angles in the same chart by selecting certain things. Based on the selection, everything changes automatically. If we have four parameters in a particular item, when you select a parameter, the remaining charts on that page automatically change for that particular parameter.

Its price could be better. Its licensing cost is very high.

We discovered it about two months ago, and we started using it.

It is very stable.

You can scale it to thousands of users. It is a cloud product. Microsoft Cloud is being used by people across the world. So, there is no limitation in terms of scalability.

At the moment, we have about five users, but the number of users will increase to 50. We are absolutely going to keep using it.

We generally don't approach Microsoft for support. We are able to handle things at our end.

We used simple Excel reports, but Excel reports are not as good as Power BI. Power BI is far ahead.

It is a cloud product. You can access it through a web browser. It takes no time. 

It takes time only when you have to prepare the reports because you need to know how to prepare the Power BI reports. There is an MIS team, and there are Power BI designers who design the reports, but for users, it doesn't take much effort because they just have to click and see.

Its licensing cost is very high. It is $20 per user, which is very high, but it is a good product, so you pay for it.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

We use it mainly for Qlik Sense. We're using business interests analytics. Everyone from marketing to sales uses it. Microsoft BI is usually used for oversight.

Microsoft BI is easy and but not very user-friendly. But you can directly connect it to an Excel file. You can find out how many sites to look at and do it yourself directly. The Microsoft Power BI app is very good. It's also very flexible. 

The dashboard could be simplified. The service is currently good, but it could be better. If you compare it to Tableau and Qlik Sense, they are doing much better work. The ability of their dashboards is much better. The technical part is easy in Qlik Sense, where we can do some coding. It isn't easy in Power-BI.

Microsoft BI can be more user-friendly. Scalability is also a challenge for us because it's difficult to handle Power BI's dashboard.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the last four years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution. We haven't had any issues yet.

It's not very scalable because it's difficult to manage the Microsoft BI dashboard.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is very easy.

Their price is good.

I would recommend this product to potential users. But if they have options, I would recommend one of the others.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a six.

We use Power BI to manage all business indicators. Our customers' files, operations, number of transactions, satisfaction levels, history. We have a very powerful dashboard we use in Power BI and all our customers use it. I use it to drill down data from customers, to make decisions regarding business and other things. We are Microsoft partners and I'm a board member of our company.  

Power BI has a unique set of APIs to connect different databases on different systems. It means that I can extract data from a variety of sources and systems. It's very flexible. I work with numerous systems. We have new systems, super fast systems, and I have very old systems that run very well. They don't need updating because they run so well. Power BI has the power to connect with different sources, and I have a data scientist that orchestrates all that data because it's also about understanding the data, the application of intelligence and strategy on the data, and exposing it on the dashboard. 

I think that they should improve the mobile application that they have, it's very poor. We generally have a very huge area to cover, to move blocks and data. But sometimes I need a small set of data that I can see in my personal iPhone. But the iPhone solution, and the solution from any smartphone, tablet, etc., is so limited. It's particularly important now when so many people are working from home. Sometimes I need to reply to a call from my support or customer teams, they might be asking for a concession for a customer. I want to be able to look at the data on that customer. I take out my phone and I have no data. It's the worst. I think that if they improve the mobile solutions, it would help me and my team. 

I've been using this solution for five years. 

The stability of the product is very good. Microsoft solutions are very reliable. They're very mature and deliver reliable solutions. 

The scalability is good and powerful. Everyone in the company uses Microsoft tools, predictive tools. Microsoft 365, Power BI, SharePoint, Teams, Word, PowerPoint.

Technical support is a challenge, it's a complex question. Microsoft has different levels of support, it's all very customized. Different kinds and sizes of companies require different levels of support. The support is strong but it comes at a price. It's their business model. I can buy a number of hours from a specialist and get a real-time response.

The initial setup is quite complex and not easy to manage. You need a data scientist. It's not only connected to a data source, it's not only connected to an Excel sheet. For basic use that's okay but for corporate use to extract major features from the solution, you need a data scientist. It's expensive but a necessity and it's a very good investment for companies, because the data scientist enables the company to make better decisions and to help improve customer satisfaction.

It's very important to have a very good data scientist, without that it's very difficult. It's a key requirement. I'm only unhappy with the Windows software. I'm a Mac user for over 20 years, and, in comparison, Windows is bad. For us, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM are not affordable. They're interested in larger companies. In the last few years, Microsoft seems to be happier to go for the smaller companies too.

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

The primary use case for this solution is mirroring it to the dock so we can match up different parts of Office like Excel, Word, etc. and then we can clear it.

Microsoft always believes in adding different features. We did have some issues building the Microsoft blog.

We were having trouble working with the icons.

The Microsoft tech support blog was very helpful to me. But, it supports the non-BI people also.

I was not involved with implementation of the product.

I do not have a comment on the pricing of the solution.

• It is free. 
• SSAS and SSRS work great together. 
• There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code.

It has the most secured database that I have ever used, which is the most important part of Microsoft BI.

The reporting part of Microsoft BI is rather limited compared to other reporting tools.

It works perfectly so far.

The information which we are working on is not that deep.

We use information from the Internet everyday.

We previously used iFrame.

We did long studies about which tool to use in our company. We decided to use Microsoft BI because it was a complete product, and it is easier and cheaper than others.

In the beginning, it was a rather complex because all the documents are in English. If it is in French, it was really complex, so then we would have to read the English documents. That was the most difficult thing here. It made the product difficult to use, because of the language, so Microsoft did provide help.

In the beginning, we were about to choose Pentaho because it is an open source suite. The problem is that beyond the enterprise version of Pentaho, it is more expensive than Microsoft. We would always need to rely on an expert of Pentaho, instead of finding solutions on the Internet, and that was the reason why we did not choose it.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Price
• Ability to go on the Internet and locate support information.
• Secure product
• Easy interface to use.

We use it for visualization, to create presentations and dashboards. It works pretty well.

We are using Power BI because it is one of the best tools. It has been very good for all situations. The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae.

It is easy to work with. The tool is very complete.

The stability is good, no problem. We haven't had any trouble with it.

Our solutions are not for very many people, say 25 users. For them, it works very well. I don't know how it works with more users than that.

The customers we work with didn't have very elegant solutions. They were using traditional ERP and were getting default reports. Now, with programming code, it is fantastic. They are very happy with our solutions with Power BI.

Qlik Sense and QlikView are very good tools, very close to Power BI. Tableau is also a competitor but we haven't used it.

When selecting a vendor we look for expertise, a company that understands the problems and knows the market, solutions, tools; and one that creates successful products. That is the most important criterion. Also, when you are in front of your clients, you need to know who is supporting you from the back.

I would rate Power BI at eight out of 10 because it enables us to do all the things we want to do. Moving forward, for more than 5,000 users, or for very complex dashboards, we don't know how it works.

I always recommend Power BI. It's very good.