Microsoft Power BI Reviews

The IT department has dashboards for reporting to the higher levels of management.

The solution is deployed on a hybrid model: cloud-based and on-premise. We always get the latest version because we have the Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft.

We encourage end users to use Power BI because it's quite easy for them to interact with the menus and the navigation bar. Even for ordinary users, they can create their own dashboard using Power BI.

There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users. These improvements wouldn't be too technical.

I have been using Microsoft BI for a very long time—since it was first released.

The solution is stable enough, but I think Tableau has a better interactive UX and user experience. We are not using Tableau right now.

We have tens of thousands of users, and we are willing to increase the number of users.

Support is amazing.

I have experience with Tableau.

The license is on a yearly basis.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. I would recommend this solution for others. 

We don't have any other solution out there right now, so I would say we are satisfied with it. There are some disadvantages, some weaknesses of Microsoft Power BI that we have addressed to the Microsoft team.

The IT department has a good relationship with the Microsoft team, so they always give input to Microsoft's department teams.

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.

My company uses Microsoft BI's dashboards. We build them for the business and the operations team. We have four to five customers using this solution.

The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use.

I would like to see the usability improved with Microsoft BI. Microsoft BI has its own challenges in terms of user interface and how quickly somebody can learn how to use it.

I have been using Microsoft BI for four years.

Microsoft Power BI is stable compared to any other business subjects or any other tools.

Any Microsoft project is scalable. 

Technical support has been good.

We have used QlikView. Microsoft BI's dashboards are easier to use and not as complex.

The initial setup of Microsoft BI is straightforward and easy to install. We install ourselves.

I would recommend Microsoft BI. The dashboards are not that complex and are easy to use. 

I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

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.

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.

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.

We are a solution provider and Microsoft BI is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

Microsoft BI is easy to implement, as it is a web-based product that doesn't need to be installed.

This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly.

The visualizations are pretty easy to create. In fact, if you want to create anything new, it is pretty easy to do.

The reporting capability is good.

There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for between six and seven years.

This is a stable product.

Microsoft BI is scalable.

We also use Oracle BI.

The implementation process is pretty easy.

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

This product is good in terms of cost, it is pretty easy to implement, and I can recommend it for those features and the reporting.

Overall, the product is good but there are a few limitations.

I would rate this solution a seven 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.