Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Currently, it is used in our financial reporting and financial consideration reports.

It is stable.

It has good functionality and is fully integrated with Microsoft products. If you have already a direct connection or direct integration with Microsoft products, it is very good actually. In some cases, we just developed our BI dashboard and sent it to PowerPoint, for example. It'll be published as the power BI format, which is very good as a feature, to have that capability to just easily populate everything in PowerPoint.

Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially.

It's pretty user-friendly.

The product can scale.

Our main concern with Power BI is it doesn't have a connection with the finance application. Power BI is used to present some financial data. However, if there is no direct connection or a ready API to be connected either to Oracle ERP or SAP or a different ERP, it won't be very useful. We need more integration capabilities. 

We've been using the solution for five years. 

The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability has been great. If a company needs to expand it, it can.

In my organization, there are about 10 to 20 users. The majority have shifted to Qlick.

I haven't contacted technical support in the past. The product has been so stable we haven't needed assistance. 

We have multiple BI tools. We previously worked with Oracle BI. Our expectations were not met, and therefore we moved over to Microsoft BI.

In my sector, currently, we are using Qlik Sense. We started using it one year ago.

We are shifting from Microsoft to Qlik due to the fact that we have Oracle ERP as a back end. We are trying to find a technology or BI, which already has a direct connection with this ERP. We went into Qlik Sense for that reason.

The initial setup is straightforward, actually. It is like any other Microsoft product. All of Microsoft's products are straightforward. It isn't complicated. This is one of the main benefits.

I'm not sure how long the deployment process was. I can't speak to how big the technical team was that handled the rollout.

We pay an annual licensing fee. 

I would recommend the solution if they already have a Microsoft ERP system. If they have already Microsoft and they have already their financial system in place and if they don't have data movement, Power BI will be very powerful. If a company has different financial systems, they have to track all these data points first, build the business model and then import it to Power BI. 

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

For the most part, clients require dashboards. We are developing quite a few dashboards for them.

The solution has improved a lot within the organization. We can view chunks of data and detailed data at various levels. 

When we have done training in the cloud previously, I have a long experience in BI tools. I've worked on Cognos BI, Informatica, and other tools including QlikView. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

There are some great automation elements in the product.

It's a good tool and designing dashboards is easy.

In SAP, we have a suite of components here in a single module. This includes forecasting and budgeting. There's also a smart answers section. Whenever we design any chart or something, the tool provides some information regarding that data. That would be quite a good feature that could be included in future versions of Microsoft BI.

The licensing could be a bit better.

You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI.

I've used the solution for about one year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. I haven't had issues with it crashing or freezing.

The scalability is great. If you need to expand the product, you can do so. You can easily add more users. 

I'm not sure how many users are using the product. 

Technical support is great. I've worked with them before and have been happy with their level of service. 

I've previously used Cognos BI. I've also had the opportunity to work with SAP.

I haven't got any opportunity to install any Power BI system. That said, for tutorial purposes, I have installed the desktop version in my system. It was very smooth.

It took 30 to 40 minutes for me to install the desktop version. During my learning phase, I prepared one dashboard. Similar to when I worked on Cognos BI, there were some features that we have to hard code and incorporate manually. There is some automation in Power BI. For example, if we are designing some interactive things we have to write code possibly. Still, even having to write code, in Power BI, was a very smooth experience.

We have people on our team that can handle maintenance tasks. 

We had a team of five to six people that handled the implementation in-house.

The client is continuing to use it, likely due to the fact that they see some sort of ROI. However, I don't have exact metrics. 

I'd prefer if the licensing was a bit better.

The customers need to pay the licensing fee. I can't speak to the exact pricing for their contract.

Typically, the solution architect is the one who decides which tool to use. However, we also were there and had a brainstorming session before choosing the tools. We did look at open-source options. At the time I prepared one checklist comparison between all the tools available in the market. Those included SAP, QlikView, and Tableau.

We are an integrator and a partner. We are providing support activities to one of our clients.

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

I use this for its analysis service.

I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it.

Every tool has room for improvement. Microsoft also has a lot of room for improvement. If you look at the new tool, even though they promised that you could do data modeling, that you could do everything from the Power BI side, if your data is really large in volume, sometimes it doesn't work on the Power BI. More feature testing from their side would certainly help users.

I've used this for eight years. I've used this solution within the last 12 months.

This solution is stable. It's a nice solution to have.

This solution is very much scalable.

Technical support is good. It's not really very helpful sometimes, but it is good.

We previously used a different solution for a different location, a different customer. If a customer decides to go for one vendor, they stick to that vendor, so changing a vendor is not an option most of the time.

Initial setup is straightforward, but it depends on the business case. It's straightforward, but sometimes it is complex, but compared to any other tool, the setup for this solution is straightforward.

My experience with them is okay.

I wasn't able to evaluate other options before choosing because it was already chosen by the customer.

Deployment for this solution in our organization is mixed: on-premise and through Microsoft cloud.

If you have a source on the Microsoft side then it's always easier to use one vendor for end-to-end solution. Even if there are some other sources, Microsoft has a big and varied area. Take the reporting ETL analysis as an example, everything's built as part Microsoft. It's always good to have one vendor than multiple vendors.

How long deployment of this solution takes all depends on how much data you have. Sometimes it takes a long time if you have a billion rows of data e.g. it could take hours. It also depends on the architecture. It depends on so many things.

There are a hundred users of this solution in our organization. The real users are customers who require reporting to make business decisions. Mostly the users are business analysts.

This solution is pretty much automated, so no maintenance. For AD, some are there as a team, so they help.

No plans of increasing usage of this solution. Maybe in the future, but not right now.

My advice to other people looking into implementing Power BI is to go for it. It's one tool that has everything, and they should always try to evaluate Microsoft compared to open source. Like in open source, you'll always have a lot of libraries, a lot of different tools that you would be using. It's great to try Microsoft Suite because at the end, you'll only have to deal with one vendor so maintenance will be less.

The lesson that I have learned from using Power BI is to try it out. Don't just rely on the features and promises about the solution. You first try it out, then share your experiences with the customer.

My rating for this solution would be seven or eight out of ten because it has everything in it and I don't see anything missing in it. It is efficient for our needs.

We are a consultant company so we use the many tools, just for our customers. However, we have professional services on, for example, Microsoft Power BI.

The initial setup is easy.

The solution is cloud-native. 

It works well with Microsoft products. 

The licensing is very simple.

We find the solution offers good stability.

You can scale the solution if you need to. 

Technical support has always been helpful and responsive.

Pricing is quite reasonable.

They should improve the connector to on-premises data. Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources. You have a gateway. It's not very easy.

The solution offers good stability. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The product scales well. If a company needs to expand it, it's not a problem.

We use a couple of professionals from Microsoft directly for our clients, and we are really satisfied with them.

We use SAS BI and Microsoft BI. I prefer Microsoft BI as, from a licensing point of view, it's easier as it's a per-user licensing. If Power BI is the right tool for companies, it's a shorter time-to-market approach to business intelligence.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex or difficult. A company should have no issue with the process. 

We find the licensing to be very straightforward. It's easier to understand than other options on the market. 

The pricing is fairly inexpensive. It's not a costly solution.

We have a business relationship with Microsoft. We are a Microsoft Gold Partner for cloud products. In the past, we've used a lot of Microsoft products and also some of our clients have used them directly.

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

I'd advise that new users should take care of the technical architecture in order to connect in the right way to the data sources to extract data.

We have many use cases, from creating full ETL workloads for supporting some dashboards to only building dashboards by themselves. For example, there is one stage where we had to do some data integration from several sources to assess the quality of the data that we are consuming for our projects. We had to ingest data and convert it using Power BI, which is useful but isn't the best ETL tool, and I understand that that is not its purpose. Finally, we built out a schema model and built reports upon that. It's a full project. 

We also have another project, where we are attempting to do some incremental refresh because we are ingesting a lot of data from lake sources and SQL sources. We are doing direct query and applying some optimization from Synapse.

I am currently using the latest version of Power BI.

The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything.

Something that everyone has suggested and that we are currently implementing and testing is the ability to export tables with the same format. That is something many customers were seeking, and right now it is possible to do that. Focusing on table support is a huge opportunity.

One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.

When you try to process a lot of data from one million records, it breaks. The computer runs out of CPU and memory. It's terrible, but I know it's not its main purpose, so that would be my suggestion.

It's stable, but the desktop is not so stable. I have experienced several crashes. I would say there is a lot of opportunity for improvement on that.

A couple of people are needed for deployment and maintenance. You always need a developer who is proficient on Power Query and maybe some other DevOps guy who sets up the pipeline. So, maybe two people at most. It's very easy.

Scalability on the ETL side is not so good. When you run the workloads on service, you can fail almost anything, but it's not exactly the best for scaling.

On the virtualization side, I would say it's good.

I haven't actually needed much technical support. I know there are forums and people respond, but I haven't really sought that out. There is so much documentation online, there are books online, and there are YouTube channels from guys that provide solutions to issues and to some other stuff. The community is very proficient.

It is very easy. Even non-IT professionals use it and deliver value to the company.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is to just jump right into it, download the Power BI desktop and start looking at YouTube channels. There are lots of people who have made wonderful things on YouTube.

I'm a call center consultant and I use Microsoft BI to receive in-depth metrics. I download the metrics from the contact center and then I can figure out what's going on in the contact center. Additionally, if we integrate it with other tools and databases, et cetera, we can receive a better understanding of what is happening. For example, we had a customer that made products for Costco and Walmart and if they had an engineering issue or a problem, they don't find out about it until they saw the orders from the engineering team explaining what the issue was.

We added a screen to the agent's desktop and listed the model numbers of the products and then used Microsoft BI analytics to see what particular problem happened to what product. The executive could drill down and hear the calls as to what the customer was saying about the issue.

The executives liked the data, the engineers liked hearing what the customers were saying about the certain product that had an issue.

Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau.

You can set Microsoft BI up for administration to use it and then you can set up views for your end-users to look at. For example, if you are a report analyst you could have your marketing person wants Microsoft BI to report on how many widgets the East Coast sold in five years, if you set Microsoft BI up the right way, they can retrieve that information themselves. You save manpower from your IT staff.

Microsoft BI is a lot easier to analyze data than with other solutions, such as Excel.

I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately one year.

I have found Microsoft BI is stable. 

I have not had any issues. I am a new user myself, and I typically suggest an application that I have found good and then somebody else that I work with, would set it up.

The solution has been scalable for what I use it for.

I have not used technical support.

I have used Tableau.

The initial setup is very easy because it is on the cloud. You only need to have your database and connect it to Microsoft BI. They have different connectors in order to make it easy to do.

I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution.

The solution has all the features I need, I do not use large data sets.

I rate Microsoft BI a ten out of ten.

We use it for data visualization.

It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc.

There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you.

It is absolutely stable.

It is absolutely scalable. You can scale it a lot.

It has been straightforward and easy. 

In terms of maintenance, for the most part, it is fairly low-maintenance. Once you have it set, it is fire-and-forget. The users want to see the view and the information, and there is nothing more to do other than just let it be.

I would give it an eight out of 10. It is a pretty powerful tool.

In general Microsoft, BI is used to build dashboards, and the analyzing of data as well as some econometrics.

Primarily, it's all about visualization and dashboards. My organization is large, and I don't believe Power BI as a tool has changed or revamped the entire organization; rather, it assists us in creating dashboards. It made things easier. 

The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use.

I would like to see more visualization options. I have noticed that it's more driven by corporate data when you look at it. Because I work for the IMF, my data is slightly different, and the corporate solution does not always work.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for one year.

We are using the most recent version.

It can be deployed both on-premises and on the cloud.

Microsoft BI has been good. I don't believe I have any issues with the stability aspect of it yet.

Scalability is good; for the time being, it serves the purpose of what we are trying to achieve. However, we haven't attempted to scale it very much.

There should be more than a hundred users in our organization. I'm only referring to the people who develop and implement changes, whereas people who use the dashboards and view them on the entire URL on that page represent the entire organization. There are about 100 or 200 people who actually work and develop things.

For the time being, we are only using it for dashboards because we have other tools for analytics and other things.

I have not contacted technical support.

We work in such a way that we can use any tool and accomplish whatever we want. That's the way it works. I wouldn't be able to say that every team uses Power BI for the same purpose, but we have Power BI available to us and can use it however we see fit. I know that it is primarily used for dashboards at this point.

I installed my own personal version of it, and it appeared to be pretty straightforward.

We have a large IT team to update and maintain this solution.

In most cases, the setups are completed by our vendors. We only receive the finished product.

I would rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.