Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use Power BI in cloud solutions in other systems. There are lots of products in our environment that work with Power BI. One use case is we use it to track the real-time sensor data to Power BI using Azure.

We have lots of customers. We make premium subscription projects for them. We have a Tableau portion. We are also Tableau partners and resellers. As a company, we make lots of Tableau projects. 

The most powerful site of Power BI is the cloud site. You can do everything in power BI. There are lots of things that the solution provides. If you have a huge data warehouse in the cloud, Power BI fits. 

In some cases, there are some add-ons that you can put together in Power BI - for example, data factory, data bricks, and also data lakes. Some Microsoft solutions work together and are integrated already. You don't need to worry about that.  

If you know what you do, Power BI is a good solution.

The solution is stable. 

The product can scale. 

There are some limitations of Power BI. The front end, for example, is not fancy.

The solution should not be used in some cases. 

The cost of the solution can get high.

There is a strong community around the solution that can help users learn about the product and troubleshoot.

When we compare Power BI with other solutions, we can see there are lots of things that should be done. Some things are there, however, they are not working well. Microsoft puts lots of solutions in one place and declares it a complete solution. However, in the practice, you can see that this STK is not working properly or the request is not giving the same results. You discover that when you open a ticket to Microsoft. They will tell you that they are still in development on that product so it will available in the future. 

When you use the Power BI as an enterprise solution, as a consultant, you find out that the product is not fully ready for enterprise. In that way, we suffer a lot. That said,  every version becomes better.

They need to have an analytics suite of some sort.

I've been working with BI solutions for 20 years. I've been using Power BI for two years so far.

The product is stable. For one of our customers, there are one thousand clients connecting to the same report. Everyone gets their own results and can search them. It needs more power. It can consume a lot of energy. 

The scalability of the product is great. It's on the cloud, which makes it easy to scale. 

There are good communities and groups that can help you troubleshoot if necessary.

I'm also familiar with Tableau.

We are SAP partners and resellers also. We make lots of SAP business intelligence solutions and do business intelligence projects.

Step-by-step implementation is easy. The difficult part is when you enter the infrastructure site. There are lots of Power BI developers, however, they do not know the other cloud environment. In that way, they can only design the front site. That said, they should know the architecture. They should know the other infrastructure and know the data also. If they do, they can produce lots of things. As an example, Microsoft offers a flow integration so that you can create a data flow that consumes the data and give the results to other services. Also, there are lots of things that you can do, however, you need to know the Azure environment in order to do them. 

In some cases, Power BI can be expensive.

We are using the current version of the solution.

I'd advise new users that there are lots of communities and lots of user groups that deal with the product. They should attend them. They should watch the videos about Power BI. It's important to extend your knowledge. If you want to be a Power BI developer, you should also know the other technologies as well.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution across many company verticals and within every area of the company - including finance, accounting, operations, logistics, HR, et cetera.

In general, it's helping companies be more efficient, more productive.

There's not one specific feature we prefer. I would say it depends on the customer and the processes. What is important to one user may not be as important to another. There's no one feature that excels over another so that we don't see it like second place.

The product offers very good efficiency.

The solution is very stable.

The solution can scale well.

The documentation on offer is good.

We found the initial setup to be straightforward.

In Power BI, it would be ideal if we had the capability to import data with forms or similar methods.

It would be nice to have the ability to have a service price to offer customers of Power BI, without having the customer be part of Power BI, I would say. Maybe that could help us consult the suppliers.

The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards. It can sometimes get a bit slow.

I've been dealing with the solution for about five years or so. It's been a while.

The solution is extremely stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable in terms of performance, but it is slow sometimes.

The solution is easily scaled.

Most of our clients are quite large companies. The companies we deal with have thousands of users, however, only a few really use Power BI. Typically only the supervisors and managers use it, not everyone.

We've never used customer support. We haven't needed to reach out to them.

The documentation on offer is okay. It can help you troubleshoot or learn about the product.

We also work with Tableau and and QlikView alongside Microsoft. We do use some others, however, to a much lesser extent.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes a good two days to finalize.

In terms of maintenance, we have a support team that covers all of our customers. There isn't really that much that needs to be done. 

There are less expensive options on offer.

Tableau is always one of the solutions we would like to evaluate further, and ClickView is another one.

It is my understanding that ClickView is less expensive, whereas Tableau is more expensive. Really, the reason why most companies go through Microsoft is if they have a Microsoft Business Suite or Office and it's all tied in the same ecosystem. That's perhaps the biggest benefit. It's all within the same ecosystem.

We are consultants and implementers so we usually resell software. We do the end-to-end automation for customers as well. In the case of Microsoft BI, our clients are the ones that buy the license and use it. We don't necessarily use it directly.

We're always working off the latest version, as the solution is constantly updated online. 

I would recommend the solution to other companies and users. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Around 50% of our customers use this solution. We plan to extend our usage of this solution.

Our customers really like the dashboard. They can click on whatever they want for an in-depth view. Microsoft BI is very easy to set up and use. 

In general, all the Microsoft programs are integrated quite well, but it could be improved. Also, integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved.

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

If implemented correctly, Microsoft BI is quite stable. 

It's quite scalable. 

I have never contacted customer support. 

I don't know much about the licensing because our customers pay for it. 

I would recommend this solution. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a rating of nine. 

We have integrated this solution into the software that we created for a client specifically for reports and data consumption. It is a hybrid infrastructure project with hybrid integration. It has a lot of reports executed or created from the cloud.

It has helped us to have a really quick view of the most important indicators of the operational issues of our platform. It has enabled collaboration between different operational levels in the company.

The use of graphics to show and view the data indicators is the most valuable feature. It is also very stable.

Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions.

It has good stability.

We haven't used it a lot, but it seems good so far. We have only three users. We may include two or three more users to the platform.

Their technical support is bad. I didn't like the technical support of Microsoft.

We also use Oracle and Tableau.

The initial setup was not complex, but we would like a more agile process. The initial deployment took about two months. The platform that we created was very robust.

We are a reseller of the solution. We did the deployment.

We were thinking of integrating Tableau instead of Microsoft BI, but the client chose Microsoft BI.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

My primary use case is for the performance, compared to MS Dynamics NAV, and flexibility in data and dashboard building.

Better insights, flexibility, and performance.

Great performance.

• Sharing reports with non-Power BI users 
• Use of ISO weeks (European) in relative date options.

Consolidating data from multiple sources and providing dashboards to a broad set of users: Finance, Human Resources, Operations, and Leadership.

It allows individuals to do the analysis themselves. We are getting adoption beyond original expectations.

Most importantly, the dashboards. Recently, we are exploring vendor provided analysis/visuals and the use of R.

Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today.

It cuts away the time spent to source some of this information. It saves a lot of time, and a lot of things have been automated. Things that used to take close to a week, now, in one day, we are done with it.

It's actually the self-service of Power BI, because we're on a lean structure here, the technical side. So we wanted them to push some of those things back to end-users.

For our reporting services, it would be good to have the capability for email-based subscriptions. I want to be able to change the sender dynamically, without having to rely on running through an exercise passage.

I know for a fact that SAP can do this, dynamic sending for subscriptions. Also IBM Cognos can do it. Why Microsoft refused to do that, that you have to rely on add-on to be able to do that...

Overall, it has performed to our expectation. It's okay for what we want to use it for. But because they keep changing, every now and then, there's a major shift in versions, so we are trying to catch up.

I've used the IBM suite, and I've used SAP, and Microsoft is fairly stable for me. And because there is a large community for issues that arise, for every bug that you encounter, you have a solution, just Google it, without having to go for special training like with SAS.

From what I understand, it requires some level of expertise to even understand what it can do, how it can be used in a huge enterprise. That is not so easy for deployment. But for a medium sized organization, yes, it's scalable.

It was straightforward. Very straightforward.

You can just go to YouTube, somebody has done it before. Because it has GUI, just click, click, click, next, next, and you're done. And YouTube helped a lot in deploying projects: SSAS Projects, SSIS projects, and SSRS projects.

IBM Analytics. But the learning curve for IBM, that's what actually led us to pause on the implementation of the Cognos 10. Everything was pretty much difficult to do. Things that you could do in two clicks in Microsoft, you would be doing in five, ten clicks in IBM.

When selecting a vendor, the most important criteria are affordability - because of the exchange in my country - and ease of use. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10, because you can actually go from the common tools that you use, from your Excel, from your SharePoint... You can pretty much do everything with it. The little things that you can't do, you can customize it to do by writing code.

I would say that, you should look away from the limitations. Focus on the positives of it, because it's cheaper to acquire than most of the big five. It's cheaper to acquire and easy to use.