Microsoft Power BI vs Workday Prism Analytics comparison

Microsoft and Workday are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Microsoft is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0, while Workday is ranked #17 with an average rating of 9.0. Microsoft holds a 8.9% mindshare in BIT, compared to Workday’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Workday users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Power BI

Read 327 Microsoft Power BI reviews

23,151 Views
14,585 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Workday Prism Analytics

Read 5 Workday Prism Analytics reviews

1,790 Views
1,522 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Workday Prism Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and Workday Prism Analytics compete in the business intelligence and analytics space. Power BI generally has the upper hand due to its broader integration capabilities and familiarity across various industry applications, while Workday Prism Analytics is notable for its integration within Workday's ecosystem.

Features: Microsoft Power BI offers dynamic data visualization, the ability to create extensive dashboards, and strong integration with other Microsoft products. Workday Prism Analytics emphasizes enhanced data integration across Workday applications, enriched data preparation, and collaboration functionalities.

Room for Improvement: Power BI could improve its data modeling flexibility and ease of use for non-technical users. Integration with non-Microsoft ecosystems and advanced analytics capabilities can also be enhanced. Workday Prism Analytics could benefit from expanding its integration capabilities beyond Workday’s ecosystem. Furthermore, improving its user interface and reducing the complexity of data preparation and transformation would make it more accessible.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Power BI offers streamlined deployment with both cloud and on-premises options supported by a comprehensive service infrastructure. Workday Prism Analytics provides cloud-based deployment, facilitating quick access to Workday-native analytics, which is particularly advantageous for organizations heavily using Workday solutions.

Pricing and ROI: Microsoft Power BI is known for its flexible pricing model, often resulting in a favorable ROI, especially for those utilizing Microsoft ecosystems. Workday Prism Analytics uses a more niche pricing approach, targeting enterprises invested in Workday systems. While this might involve higher initial costs, the ROI is justifiable for enterprises seeking deep insights within Workday infrastructures.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Power BI vs. Workday Prism Analytics Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Workday Prism Analytics

February 2026

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Helped 881,733 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

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

327

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (1st)

Workday Prism Analytics

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

17th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 8.9%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Workday Prism Analytics is 1.2%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	8.9%
Workday Prism Analytics	1.2%
Other	89.9%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Livia Vasilescu

HR Manager at PPB

Use advanced data preparation features in analytics projects

Microsoft Power BI can be quite slow when working with data sources that aren't from a data warehouse or a more robust source or data artifact. When working with exports, which we do frequently, the load takes considerable time. This occurs with any BI tool, and it's related to our working methods due to limitations within the area. In HR, we typically use exports because we have numerous data sources. Ideally, Microsoft Power BI would have a no-code or low-code solution for the data sources to be built by the actual developers or development team. This would eliminate the need to work directly with exports. We would have a middle ground to create a warehouse without all the infrastructure, as building a warehouse within an organization can require substantial resources, both in time and personnel.

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Sarvesh Kumar Jha

Senior Technology Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers

Provides great flexibility in terms of data transformation

I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation. Workday introduced Prism Analytics mainly because many clients wanted to merge data from different systems and then work with it to get some insights out of it. For that, they previously used tools like Power BI. Workday Prism Analytics gives you the power to do all the data transformations within Workday itself without taking out crucial data to a third system. I really like the way Workday has enabled Prism Analytics to be that one solution where you can bring everything. It also provides you the flexibility that things like the security model of Workday are still in place. You don't have to redo your security configuration if you do the data transformation outside Workday.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers."

"Ability to extract data from a variety of sources and systems."

"You can integrate Microsoft Power BI with various other solutions like Intune."

"I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool."

"The solution is easy to use and flexible."

"The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points."

"The DAX coding language is good for creating formulae."

"The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"The product is easier to use compared to other applications."

"The customer service and support are pretty good."

"I really like the flexibility the solution provides in terms of data transformation."

"Feature-wise, I feel that the solution's stability is good."

"The solution is stable and reliable, with minimal issues affecting its performance."

Cons

"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."

"In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility."

"We haven't used it that long and I haven't come across anything that's stood out as needing to be fixed."

"I would like to see better, undisturbed stability without any interruptions."

"From any improvement perspective, I want the product to be made available to users free of cost...The stability and scalability of the product can be better."

"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."

"There are some other visuals that are available in the Microsoft marketplace, however, you need to use them via trial and error. There needs to be a write-up about how to use them with a quick guide describing the visual."

"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"It is not a very scalable product."

"One area for improvement in the solution is the ability to manually update individual rows or columns of data once it has been uploaded."

"The visualization techniques must be upgraded."

"When you create certain objects, a lot of the time, the fields are text. They’re not numeric, date, or any other field type"

"There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive."

"Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level. They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it."

"Both cost-wise and implementation-wise, this product is a good choice."

"The costs are small and the benefits are high."

"Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version."

"No comment."

"All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years."

"This product offers good value for the money."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"The solution is very expensive."

"Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool."

"I do not know of the licensing cost, but there are additional costs like 5,00,000 for recruitment modules."

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Comparison Review

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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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

No data available

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...

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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Workday Prism Analytics?

Based on whatever I have heard, Workday Prism Analytics is considered an expensive tool. In fact, that has been one of the hindrance factors for Workday in making Prism Analytics more sellable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Workday Prism Analytics?

I think there are still some gaps in the solution. There is not much flexibility in how we can add external data within Workday Prisma Analytics. For now, Workday has enabled the SFTP server and Am...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Workday Prism Analytics?

As a consultant, I use Prism Analytics to implement my client systems. I first have design sessions with them, where we discuss their business gaps and then understand how Workday Prism Analytics c...

See all answers

Comparisons

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 3% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Workday Prism Analytics

Compared 17% of the time

Databricks vs Workday Prism Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Workday Prism Analytics

Compared 7% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Workday Prism Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle Essbase vs Workday Prism Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

More Workday Prism Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

January 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

February 2026

Download Workday Prism Analytics product report

Also Known As

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

Prism Analytics

Overview

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

With Workday Prism Analytics, you can bring data in at scale from any source and prepare, analyze, and securely share it with your organization. The result? You gain all the insights you need to drive better business outcomes.

Workday

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

Denny's

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI vs. Workday Prism Analytics

February 2026

Free Report: Microsoft Power BI vs. Workday Prism Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Power BI vs. Workday Prism Analytics and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.

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