Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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.

We use this data visualization tool for the business to understand data in a graphical manner. It is similar to Tableau, a tool also used for data visualization. A tool like this is used mostly by the leadership team to make decisions. 

Power BI allows you to create user-defined charts which is really useful. 

The Power Query button in the power tabs is a unique selling point and is very useful.

The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau. 

I have been using this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We have 500 users. 

The initial setup was easy. 

The main difference between Power BI and Tableau is the cost. Power BI is much cheaper. Tableau is the best BI tool that I've worked on and is easier for developers to work with. However, there are many things that can be done in Power BI which can't be done in Tableau.

If you're starting working with Power BI, then I would suggest first getting experience with the free version of Tableau to understand and learn about data visualization. From there, moving to Power BI will be much easier as the tools are so similar. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use Power BI in cloud solutions in other systems. There are lots of products in our environment that work with Power BI. One use case is we use it to track the real-time sensor data to Power BI using Azure.

We have lots of customers. We make premium subscription projects for them. We have a Tableau portion. We are also Tableau partners and resellers. As a company, we make lots of Tableau projects. 

The most powerful site of Power BI is the cloud site. You can do everything in power BI. There are lots of things that the solution provides. If you have a huge data warehouse in the cloud, Power BI fits. 

In some cases, there are some add-ons that you can put together in Power BI - for example, data factory, data bricks, and also data lakes. Some Microsoft solutions work together and are integrated already. You don't need to worry about that.  

If you know what you do, Power BI is a good solution.

The solution is stable. 

The product can scale. 

There are some limitations of Power BI. The front end, for example, is not fancy.

The solution should not be used in some cases. 

The cost of the solution can get high.

There is a strong community around the solution that can help users learn about the product and troubleshoot.

When we compare Power BI with other solutions, we can see there are lots of things that should be done. Some things are there, however, they are not working well. Microsoft puts lots of solutions in one place and declares it a complete solution. However, in the practice, you can see that this STK is not working properly or the request is not giving the same results. You discover that when you open a ticket to Microsoft. They will tell you that they are still in development on that product so it will available in the future. 

When you use the Power BI as an enterprise solution, as a consultant, you find out that the product is not fully ready for enterprise. In that way, we suffer a lot. That said,  every version becomes better.

They need to have an analytics suite of some sort.

I've been working with BI solutions for 20 years. I've been using Power BI for two years so far.

The product is stable. For one of our customers, there are one thousand clients connecting to the same report. Everyone gets their own results and can search them. It needs more power. It can consume a lot of energy. 

The scalability of the product is great. It's on the cloud, which makes it easy to scale. 

There are good communities and groups that can help you troubleshoot if necessary.

I'm also familiar with Tableau.

We are SAP partners and resellers also. We make lots of SAP business intelligence solutions and do business intelligence projects.

Step-by-step implementation is easy. The difficult part is when you enter the infrastructure site. There are lots of Power BI developers, however, they do not know the other cloud environment. In that way, they can only design the front site. That said, they should know the architecture. They should know the other infrastructure and know the data also. If they do, they can produce lots of things. As an example, Microsoft offers a flow integration so that you can create a data flow that consumes the data and give the results to other services. Also, there are lots of things that you can do, however, you need to know the Azure environment in order to do them. 

In some cases, Power BI can be expensive.

We are using the current version of the solution.

I'd advise new users that there are lots of communities and lots of user groups that deal with the product. They should attend them. They should watch the videos about Power BI. It's important to extend your knowledge. If you want to be a Power BI developer, you should also know the other technologies as well.

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

We are implementing it for dashboard presentation. For example, one of our customers is in the energy sector. Another one is in the government sector, so it's dashboards mainly.

The ability to create dashboard presentations for various sectors is a valuable feature. It's an excellent product.

We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python. Other than that, it's an excellent product.

Another area that could be improved is maybe more extensions or more visuals.

I have been working with Power BI for four or five years. I am working with the latest version. It's a monthly release.

The solution is stable.

Microsoft BI is scalable.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

For someone who is looking into implementing this product, my advice is to check between the two versions because Microsoft Power BI is not one solution. You have one solution which is coming with SQL services on-prem and you have the cloud solution. You need to check because there are differences in the features. Anyone who is implementing Power BI needs to be careful on which platform they're using: on-premise or on the cloud. There is a difference in the features between the two solutions.

We use Microsoft BI for dashboards and monitoring tools and dashboards. We mostly use it to produce charts and graphs for our customers.

The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools.

The solution could improve by having more attractive graphical charts.

I have been using Microsoft BI for two and a half years.

Microsoft BI has been stable in my usage.

The scalability of Microsoft BI is good.

We have approximately 2,000 users using this solution.

The technical support is very good, they have been available when we needed them.

The installation is straightforward.

My advice to others would be to compare Microsoft BI to all the other similar solutions and see what fits their use case best. If they're looking for nice looking charts then perhaps, they should compare this solution to the others. If you are looking for a solution that is easy to use and quick to learn then Microsoft BI could be the right fit.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of ten.

The primary use cases for Microsoft BI are typical for business intelligence, including operational monitoring and KPI tracking.

Microsoft BI is easy to use and simple.

The user interface could be a bit more intuitive. Some parts of the user interface could be a bit more intuitive so that it's a bit easier to use.

I have been using Microsoft BI for the past four years.

Microsoft BI is stable. 

Microsoft BI is fairly scalable.

I have not really had to contact Microsoft BI. I think my use cases so far have been pretty simple so I did not feel the need to interact with them.

The initial setup takes only a few minutes. It's just a matter of downloading the file and installing it.

Once it is installed, it takes minimal involvement from a maintenance perspective. It runs on its own.

We deployed Microsoft BI in-house. We did not need a vendor team to come in. 

We are not paying any licensing fees for our current Microsoft BI setup. The version that we are using is free of cost unless you wish to deploy it on a server; that is where the cost component comes in.

I recommend Microsoft BI. 

We use Power BI for dashboards and various reports. It's primarily a visualization tool. We don't use it for business intelligence— just visualization.

I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use.

The maps in Power BI could be improved. You deal with many maps over the years, like maps of America and Saudi Arabia. The maps aren't detailed enough, and there aren't enough visualization tools. Whenever I want to use a map, I struggle with choosing the right visualization.

We've been using Microsoft BI for about three years now.

Microsoft BI is scalable. There are some limitations depending on the amount of data you need, but it's enough for me so far. We have about 50 users, and we'll likely increase our usage in the coming years as Microsoft adds more features and our people train themselves to do more with it. 

Setting up Microsoft BI is straightforward. It took about one week if you include training on how to send reports and other things. We were able to do it by ourselves with a team of about five people. 

The license is annual. If you need a fancy visualization, you have to pay a bit more, but a valid license covers everything else. I'm developing reports and rolling them out to some users who are not developers, so I need the visualization and have to pay for the license. In the case of Tableau, you don't need to pay, or maybe you spend a little less because you're not a developer. 

I rate Microsoft BI 10 out of 10. 

My primary uses of this solution are BI reporting using SQL server reporting, Power BI online reports, and BI dashboards. We connect to SQL server databases plus other sources, including data warehouses in the cloud and on-premise.

There are areas where BI lags behind its competitors - for example, Qlik has an in-built data manipulation engine while BI does not. I also do not like transformation in BI, as we have to go back to the data for this process instead of being able to do things on the fly, as with Qlik. Other areas for improvement include the language that BI uses, the ability to do data manipulations, and the flexibility of the licensing models. In the next release, I would like to see manipulation and internal analytics, as well as some analytics features.

I've been using this solution for four years.

I've seen no issues with BI's stability.

BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage and always having to go back to the data warehouse.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

Power BI is more powerful than other tools because it is new for us. Each new version has more capabilities, and we're expecting AI and ML features in the next version.

Power BI's administration could use some work, and the user experience needs to improve because it is a client-based tool. If you want to generate a model or report, you need to use client tools, but client tools are limited for end-users who don't have enough hardware. For example, maybe a client lacks enough memory or CPU power for report generators. If you use a model that requires a massive amount of data, your client will face several problems.

We are using an embedded BI because we are using it to report a portal, and this portal includes some screens that come from Power BI, so the embedded BI needs to improve. It would also be helpful if Microsoft made AI and ML capabilities available for private cloud users.

We have been using Power BI for about one year.

Power BI is stable. 

Power BI has limited scalability. The modeling area needs to improve in this regard. 

We have a limited license, but if we use more time or have more reports, usage, and concurrency, then the license cost will go up.

I rate Microsoft BI eight out of 10.