Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Our company is a manufacturing firm. We have an ERP running in our company. I develop the reports for the business that include sales, stock and production related information. These dashboards are used for analytics purposes by management, enabling them to make decisions regarding the products and business improvement.

We use the BI text file and summarize the information on dashboards to help management make the right decisions for the business. The information includes production figures, running status, forecasts and actual positions. 

We have 10  users of this solution.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is the ease of use. The data can be accessed from anywhere. We control access through Office 365.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI. Microsoft does regular updates, new features are added every month or so.

I have been using Microsoft BI for one year.

Microsoft Power BI is stable with no issue.

The solution is scalable.

Overall, technical support is good.

Prior to using Microsoft BI, we had been using OBIEE. Oracle is a complicated product with poor visuals. Comparing with Microsoft BI, we found Microsoft to have better handling, graphics, features, and easier development and coding. 

The initial deployment of Microsoft BI was relatively easy. We installed it to the machine and connected it to our Oracle database.

We were able to install the solution ourselves internally.

Microsoft BI requires licenses.

Microsoft Power BI is an easy product. If you have some idea about the business intelligence solutions and some technical knowledge, it is a self-deployed solution.

I would rate the solution an 8 out of 10.

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

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

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

I would rate Microsoft Power BI a seven out of ten.

We are using the product for some data tasks such as data binding and reporting. That's it.

The customization and management are very easy. 

We have found that the reporting and publishing are great. Sometimes people like to use the report for their teams.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The solution is scalable.

It's reliable and the performance has been good.

The cost of the product is not too high.

You need to purchase upgraded support separately.

The marketing will need to increase more now. Power BI is a good product, however, from Microsoft, and I'm not getting too much marketing information about new features or anything like that. People don't know the capabilities and they really should.

We find the solution to be stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable.

The product can scale. It's not an issue.

You do need to purchases specific support in order to get a good amount of attention. If you are a company that needs 24/7 support, you need to pay for it.

The basic support is good, although it is a little slow. 

The Microsoft support model has it set up so that a first call will only get a user to their ambassador. Okay. Their ambassador will not have too much knowledge. They just identify what is the issue then they escalate to their team. Microsoft support could improve their services to attempt to have a first call resolution. Right now, in most cases, the first call resolution is not possible.

We did not use a different solution previously.

Power BI is a fast application. Therefore, the setup is very, very easy. You just license it, sign up, and you can use it.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not overly expensive, although you will need to pay for extra support if you think you will need assistance regularly.

We only looked at Microsoft. We did not consider other options. 

We are Microsoft partners.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

I primarily use the solution for the reports. We use it a lot for self-reporting.

We're making a dashboard that can show specific details and can be easily customized. It's very useful for creating dashboards.

The reporting is good.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale it if we need to.

It's a very easy-to-use solution. The product is quite user-friendly.

The initial installation is difficult. 

The pricing is a bit high and we'd like it to be less expensive.

I've used the solution for two years now.

The product is stable. Its performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is good. If a company wants to, it can expand.

We have about 15 to 20 people that use the solution.

We're not sure if we will expand usage in the future or not. That's still to be decided.

We manage technical support ourselves. We do not need to reach out to Microsoft for help. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

I found the initial setup to be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. The deployment might take about an hour.

We use three people for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We have to pay for licensing. I've paid for a license in the past.

We'd like for it to be a little less expensive.

I would recommend the solution to others based on its ease of use.

I largely work with the engineering and R&D teams. Typically, the data insights and data teams use Power BI for business-related data visualization. However, for me and my customers, most of the tools like Power BI and Tableau are used to do data visualization for the engineering data. That could be even predicting the behavior of a machine, meantime between failure, or tracking of an IoT center data or even the behavior of the fleet management and things like that. In all the engineering use cases where we need data visualization, we use this product.

We have 16,000 to 17,000 or more people who are trained in insights and data. This group uses all the data analytics tools, data visualization tools, BI tools, and all the other tools from a business use cases perspective. It could be market basket analysis, sales reports, and all those kinds of other business reporting.

The solution has been stable.

We've found that the scalability meets our current needs.

It's good for data visualization and analysis. 

My understanding is that the initial setup is pretty easy.

Technical support has always been great for us, as strategic partners. 

There could be more scalability.

Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data. Those would be good to have.

We've been using the solution since Microsoft introduced the solution to the market.

The product is more or less stable. Power BI doesn't have any problem with the stability aspect.

The solution can scale. It meets our needs.

We are dedicated partners. We have a couple of Microsoft architects that are dedicated to us. We have fairly decent support. I don't have any problem with them. If you ask a commercial end-user what kind of Microsoft support they get, in that case, you might get a disappointing answer. For us, we are satisfied.

I work with a services company and we work with a lot of different customers. So depending on which customer, what is that ecosystem, we'll end up using a lot of different BI tools. That includes both licensed and open-sourced software as well. For example, we've used Tableau and Microsoft Power BI.

I am personally not involved in the implementation process, however, my understanding is it's not that difficult to set up.

I don't oversee day-to-day operations. I just have a team that does that for me.

I cannot speak to the exact pricing. Sometimes we, for example, resell some licenses. We are strategic partners with Microsoft. It entirely depends on how the contract with the customers is. Sometimes the customer procures all the licenses and gives them to us and sometimes we resell the licenses. It completely varies from customer to customer.

We have a strategic partnership with Microsoft and a lot of our customers also are Microsoft shops.

We use both cloud and on-prem deployments. It's a mixed kind of a situation, depending on the customer scenario and situation. We have some implementations that are on the cloud and there are some older installations, legacy installations, which are on-prem. That is also giving us an opportunity to move them to the cloud. Most of our customers are looking to move to the cloud slowly and gradually. I anticipate that we will be seeing more cloud-based installations going forward.

There are one-off scenarios where the customer has an interesting mix of cloud platforms. They might have an IoT platform that is deployed on AWS, and that data is coming to the data lake and being visualized using Power BI, however, not necessarily on Azure.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and Microsoft BI is one of the products that we implement for our customers. It is used for customized dashboarding, reporting, and self-serve analytics, on a broad scale in enterprise.

The amount of customization that you can do is good, and it's relatively straightforward to do. People with limited experience in terms of coding can implement this themselves. If an organization doesn't have a high amount of skill, internally, then it's something that they can still spin up themselves, relatively well.

It could be changed to the point where it's more suited for self-serve analytics.

The look and feel should be updated in terms of the types of dashboards and graphs that you can produce. They aren't as visual as some of its competitors.

I have been selling and using Microsoft BI for approximately two years.

Microsoft BI is a stable solution.

This product is scalable.

We have dozens of customers that use it.

The Microsoft technical support is not great. You need to have a partner in place that's able to handle these services for you. Customers aren't going to get answers quick enough if they're going directly to the vendor.

I have experience with a couple of other similar products but I'd only downloaded the free versions of these tools to play around with. One of these is Tableau.

Tableau is a solution that would be used more at the enterprise scale. It may be more suitable for analytics. 

These days, from a visual perspective in terms of analytics, dashboards, and customized dashboards, I tend to use Google products.

The complexity of the installation depends on what you're using it for. If you're doing anything relatively complex, such as working with AI or machine learning, then you would probably want to have a specialist service provider do it for you.

We've seen that people are tending to use solutions that compete with it, just because they are easier to automate. From a large-scale point of view, the installation could be simpler.

That said, in its simplest form, it can be used for self-serve analytics.

A company can handle the deployment and maintenance in-house on its own. Or, if they're doing a large-scale project, they might be in need of two engineers.

My customers pay a yearly licensing fee.

From a cost point of view, it's competitive in the enterprise space, although it's not as competitive when you add up all of the additional costs. Things like integrations cost extra and it's probably where Microsoft makes more of the money.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I mostly work in the oil and gas industry. Microsoft BI is primarily associated with surveillance, optimization, product, and forecasting-related items. While I am not currently using Microsoft BI, I have prior experience, and in my current position, I am guiding the team on a larger scale. I don't use it myself frequently, but I am the lead for that team, and when I do use it, I use it for reporting purposes.

Microsoft BI has a multitude of additional features. Overall it's an EDA tool, from which you can extract, transform, and load data. You can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources.

When I compare other analytical tools to Microsoft BI, I believe Microsoft BI is far more accurate, and the frequency is also better.

It has additional features, which are very much useful. The most important thing I like is that it is just a data platform connecting to the overall process and it can be utilized in any sector.

Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included. When we use engineering models linked to Microsoft BI or Salesforce, the engineering models are from a third-party application.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for the last three and a half years.

We are using the latest update.

I have used it both on-premises and on the cloud.

In terms of stability, I have seen some cases where it is difficult as well as some cases where it is very easy. Overall, it is a stable and reliable product.

It is easy to scale Microsoft BI.

We have a larger team. Microsoft BI specifically, is not limited to any subset or any team. I believe we have 1,000 plus users in my company currently who are using this application.

I have been in touch with the technical team, but not specifically for Microsoft BI. Based on my experience with Microsft technical support, I would rate them a four out of five.

Technical support is pretty decent.

I use a variety of tools, including Salesforce, and I have developed a number of Python-based tools.

The initial setup was simple. However, when I did it the first time, it was complex. Once I understood the process it was simple.

My field was small due to the type of setup required. I scheduled it for one week, during which we also tested.

Definitely, it requires maintenance in terms of quality checking of the data, as well as whether or not the run times or schedules are working properly.

I had some assistance when I deployed the first time, but I am now able to complete the deployment on my own.

In terms of licensing, I've never worked on the contractual side of their license. However, I believe that the number of licenses currently in use is appropriate for our organization. It also adds value to the team. I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable.

I have not used it on the mobile app. I'm not sure how Microsoft BI works on a mobile app. 

Mobile apps are sometimes third-party apps that are difficult to configure and use. As a result, mobile apps are something that will be required in the future, upcoming data transformation.

Before implementing Microsoft BI or any other analytical tool, we must first understand the domain. Basically, how the data is linked, what data you want to transform, and what output you need for the finished product. Then you proceed with your deployment in a sequential manner. It will be very simple.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. I haven't explored many other items that are feasible or possible, or the analytical part of Microsoft BI's functionality, which I haven't personally used, so there's a gap. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.