Board vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

Board International and Microsoft are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Board International is ranked #23 with an average rating of 7.7, while Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.9. Board International holds a 0.5% mindshare in BIT, compared to Microsoft’s 21.6% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Board International users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Board

Read 36 Board reviews

572 Views
389 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 319 Microsoft Power BI reviews

22,103 Views
17,369 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Board

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Board and Microsoft Power BI compete in the business intelligence and analytics market. Microsoft Power BI is seen as the leading product due to its extensive features and value for money.

Features: Board includes effective budgeting, planning, and forecasting tools, ideal for finance-centered applications, while offering performance management capabilities. Microsoft Power BI provides advanced data visualization, integration capabilities, and broad data connectivity support, emphasizing data analytics and extensive reporting features.

Room for Improvement: Board could enhance its user interface to make it more intuitive and improve documentation for non-technical users. It could also expand on pre-built templates for quicker deployment. Power BI could improve training resources for beginners, enhance its mobile experience, and streamline performance with very large data sets.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Board offers a tailored deployment model adaptable to organizational requirements but may require more time and effort. Microsoft Power BI features a straightforward, cloud-based deployment enabling rapid integration with wide-reaching online resources and comprehensive customer support.

Pricing and ROI: Board generally involves higher setup costs with customization but offers excellent ROI in finance-specific sectors. Microsoft Power BI is more cost-effective, with lower initial costs and flexible pricing, providing higher ROI through its scalability and applicability in various scenarios.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

February 2025

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Helped 845,040 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Board

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

23rd

Ranking in Reporting

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (10th)

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Ranking in Reporting

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

319

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Board is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 21.6%, down from 22.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features

I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.

Read full review

James Balbach

Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network

Robust system consistently elevates data visualization and seamlessly updates with user-driven advancements

Power BI is a general-use visualization system. I can express the performance of our network through high-level key performance indicators. It allows me to show detailed improvements in quality and safety and patient experience. I create improvement dashboards for task forces and work teams. I have built analytic dashboards that guide analytics, enabling research and dataset manipulation.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The benefits are getting the data in one spot, the ability to report dynamically, and version control."

"Instead of taking two people a week each month to perform our internal KPI reporting, the same two people can have it done in a day."

"The support from the BOARD team and their consultants is great. Whenever I use technical support, they are good."

"It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."

"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."

"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."

"It is useful for self-analysis regarding company data and helps to find areas where we can improve."

"The dynamic selections on the screen and details by function are also valuable for inside the data view."

More Board pros

"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."

"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."

"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."

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

"I like the flexibility it offers."

"One of the key factors why I use Power BI is because it's very flexible with other Microsoft tools."

"Microsoft B's beneficial features are that it is a Microsoft product and it is well known by the staff here in the company. It suited the available skills."

"Microsoft BI was very helpful for me because I had a huge variety of connections. It is very convenient to build reports, even if somebody has no experience using BI tools or data visualizations. Additionally, the performance is very good when generating reports."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"What could be better is the manual... nowadays, most people use a web client, but on the Board manual website, a lot of the information is only about the Windows client. If they could update that, it would be helpful."

"We would like to see better logging in the procedural world."

"It needs more export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly."

"One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes."

"The product can be improved by making it possible to know where cubes are used."

"The initial setup was very complex for us."

"We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."

"The engine of the Board should be made powerful like the engine of IBM planning which is more powerful in terms of performance. The consolidated finance area also needs improvement."

More Board cons

"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 cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project."

"Microsoft BI can improve some of the visual level filters or visual functionality, that are available in other BI tools, such as Tableau or Qlik Sense."

"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."

"I think that the solution is harder to use for people who are not experts in data."

"Creating dashboards could be easier."

"I would like to see the product offer more graphics to impact different audiences."

"When there are large amounts of data being processed there are additional tools needed to handle it."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"They have a free Power BI Desktop version, but it has limitations."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"Once the trial period for the BI service is over, the cost is approximately $10 USD per user, per month, so it's quite reasonable."

"Microsoft BI is not very cheap. A premium license costs roughly 5,000 euros a month."

"Power BI premium is really expensive for our market. A lot of small and medium companies would like to purchase it, but they can't afford it."

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."

"It is based on the usage. If you're using it, you pay for it, and if you're not using it, you stop paying for it."

"Microsoft BI is not expensive. Compared to the price of other BI products, the price is very fair."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

43%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...

See all answers

What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Board?

Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would like to leverage or prioritize predictive analytics as the main feature, but som...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 31% of the time

Pigment vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Board

Compared 7% of the time

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Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Board

March 2025

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Board International

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

February 2025

Free Report: Board vs. Microsoft Power BI

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