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Microsoft Power BI vs Posit comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.7
Microsoft Power BI enhances productivity with ease of use, cost-effectiveness, scalability, and improved data analysis, boosting decision-making.
Sentiment score
6.8
Posit boosted productivity and ROI, saving time and $3 million by streamlining analytics deployment and task prioritization.
In a world surrounded by data, tools that allow navigation of large data volumes ensure decisions are data-driven.
Corporate HR Financial Controller at STMicroelectronics Holding
Power BI is easy to deploy within an hour, providing robust security against data leaks.
Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd
I have seen a return on investment with Microsoft Power BI, including money saved and fewer employees needed.
Consultant at National Australian Bank
Posit simplifies the deployment of analytics outputs and reduces time spent on environment setup and troubleshooting, allowing teams to focus more on analysis and delivering insights.
Senior Manager, Scientific Computing at MSD
Since adopting Posit, by using the tool, we have saved about 57% on the amount of time needed to compile a systematic review.
Electrical Engineer Ii at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
I have seen a return on investment because Posit is the standard in the field for coding in R and deploying applications like Shiny apps, so a lot of time is saved with a very quality product.
Sr. Scientist at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Microsoft Power BI's support is mixed, with variations in responsiveness and effectiveness depending on user needs and resources.
Sentiment score
6.8
Posit’s customer support is responsive but time zone delays occur; overall satisfaction is high with effective issue resolution.
The significant drawback I notice is that Microsoft's size makes it hard to get specific change requests addressed unless they involve a bug.
Corporate HR Financial Controller at STMicroelectronics Holding
We have a partnership with Microsoft, involving multiple weekly calls with dedicated personnel to ensure our satisfaction.
Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network
The support is good because there is also a community available.
Business Development Director at a tech consulting company with 201-500 employees
Whenever we encounter any issues or require assistance with configuration, we email support@posit.co and receive an immediate response.
Data Engineer at Bayer
I would rate the technical support team a six or seven because they operate on U.S. time, which can delay response times to 24 to 48 hours.
Principal Data Enigeneer at Oracle
I encounter delays when quick responses are needed for urgent issues.
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
Microsoft Power BI is praised for scalability, cloud integration, and flexibility, but licensing and large datasets present challenges.
Sentiment score
8.4
Posit offers efficient scalability with AWS tools, handling user expansion and varied clusters, though horizontal scaling needs improvement.
You expect only a small percentage of users concurrently, but beyond a thousand concurrent users, it becomes difficult to manage.
Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd
With increasing AI capabilities, architectural developments within Microsoft, and tools like Fabric, I expect Power BI to scale accordingly.
Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network
As more data is processed, performance issues may arise.
Product Owner at ABN AMRO Bank N.V.
Posit's scalability is commendable, as we are running in EKS, so we can easily scale anywhere from 20 to 200 users with both the IDEs and app deployment.
Data Engineer at Bayer
While Posit Connect can scale vertically, horizontal scaling may be a prospective feature to consider.
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.4
Microsoft Power BI is reliable for most reporting needs, though it can slow down with large datasets and network issues.
Sentiment score
8.2
Posit is stable once set up but may struggle with large datasets and dependency issues during initial setup.
In terms of stability, there's no data loss or leakage, and precautions are well-managed by Microsoft.
Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd
We typically do not have problems with end-user tools like Excel and Power BI.
Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network
It is very stable for small data, but with big data, there are performance challenges.
Business Development Director at a tech consulting company with 201-500 employees
 

Room For Improvement

Users seek improved mobile compatibility, licensing, real-time data, advanced analytics, ease of use, and flexible design in Power BI.
Posit seeks to enhance resource management, CI/CD integration, SSH capabilities, AI, and Jupyter interfaces for enterprise use.
This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today.
Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd
Access was more logical in how it distinguished between data and its formatting.
Corporate HR Financial Controller at STMicroelectronics Holding
Microsoft updates Power BI monthly based on user community feedback.
Executive Director, Decision Support at Community Health Network
The time savings is an incredible feature and the horizontal deployability is great.
Electrical Engineer Ii at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Posit lacks a smooth solution for the build and release pipeline, requiring duplicate effort for production transitions.
Principal Data Enigeneer at Oracle
I hope for it to provide specific issue resolutions and suggestions, not just basic searches.
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Setup Cost

Microsoft Power BI provides flexible pricing options, offering free, Pro, and Premium plans for individuals, teams, and enterprises respectively.
Enterprise users find Posit's licensing easy but anticipate price hikes; some economize using Workbench only during development.
I found the setup cost to be expensive
Responsable du département Projets et Applications at CHD Vendée
Power BI isn't very cheap, however, it is economical compared to other solutions available.
Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd
The pricing for Microsoft Power BI is low, which is a good selling point.
Business Development Director at a tech consulting company with 201-500 employees
RStudio Pro and Workbench are quite costly.
Principal Data Enigeneer at Oracle
The licensing is straightforward for our enterprise environment and aligns well with our teams.
Senior Manager, Scientific Computing at MSD
 

Valuable Features

Microsoft Power BI offers strong data visualization, seamless integration, and customization, making it ideal for interactive, collaborative report creation.
Posit offers an integrated R and Python platform for seamless data analysis, visualization, collaboration, deployment, and enterprise security.
In today's data-driven environment, these tools are of substantial value, particularly for large enterprises with numerous processes that require extensive data analysis.
Corporate HR Financial Controller at STMicroelectronics Holding
Within the organization, Microsoft Power BI is used to create dashboards and gain insights into data, enhancing data-driven decision-making.
Product Owner at ABN AMRO Bank N.V.
To reduce the need for highly skilled personnel, we can engage someone who is just familiar and has a basic understanding of Microsoft Power BI, while AI can handle the major tasks through either agent AI or requirement analysis.
Senior Technical Service Engineer Expert at Fujitsu
Posit has significantly increased the productivity of our team by allowing us to incorporate AI tools and other computational tools to reduce the stress and workload of scientists so that they can continue to do science without having to worry about organization and structure.
Electrical Engineer Ii at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Posit Workbench serves as a shared IDE for users and stands out as one of the best features Posit offers.
Sr. Systems Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Posit has positively impacted my organization by definitely increasing the productivity of data scientists, saving a lot of time, and moving all biostatisticians and data scientists from their desktop to the cloud, which helps scale their work and collaborate to achieve better results for the company overall.
Data Engineer at Bayer
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Power BI
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
329
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (1st)
Posit
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 9.3%, down from 21.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Posit is 0.7%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI9.3%
Posit0.7%
Other90.0%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Flor - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group
Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards
Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.
MK
Data Engineer at Bayer
Unified analytics has transformed collaborative drug research and clinical reporting workflows
Posit can be improved as they are constantly listening to our feedback; currently, we have Databricks and Snowflake support, and we have been trying to ask for more in the LLM space, as previously only Anthropic and GitHub were available, and now we see AWS Bedrock has been added. They continue to engage with the user community across multiple customers and keep adding features. If they keep progressing in this innovation space, it would be fantastic for a company Posit to adopt more Posit. An improvement needed for Posit that I haven't mentioned yet is possibly providing more user-level training for vendors such as us; not just monthly, but at least quarterly deep dives into their features would be beneficial.
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
University
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business135
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise166
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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 ...
What is your primary use case for Posit?
My main use of Posit is to deploy Python Flask applications for internal use of tools within our company. I deployed a search query and engine that scientists can use to access a database, query re...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Posit?
Our team is pretty happy with what we pay regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing.
What needs improvement with Posit?
One of the downsides of using Posit Connect was the need for licenses for each individual user. This did become tedious to get the interested users' licenses to use the tool. We had a lot of intere...
 

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Posit and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.