Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use it for reporting. We are using its latest version.

Its visualizations and dashboards are most valuable. Power BI is great in terms of visualizations and dashboards. The reports that we previously had were not very nice in terms of visualization. It also provides the ability to play with the data.

We have a lot of servers and applications from which we want reports, and it allows us to create reports from an SQL source or some other source.

They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules.

They can improve the user interface a little bit to make it more user-friendly. When creating a dashboard, it is not very user-friendly. You have to click on a certain style and use your keyboard keys to move it. You cannot drag and drop it. 

Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case.

I have been working with Power BI for five or six months.

I am at the initial stage of using it. We have just deployed a report in our organization, and it is working fine so far. It seems to be stable. I am not sure if we faced any issues with it.

It is good in terms of scalability.

I have had only one interaction with them, and it was a bad one. They took around a month to resolve a simple issue. We also had to escalate the case. The resolution was very simple, and ideally, they should have found it on the first day. They normally take too long when it comes to the escalation of cases.

As a first-time user, I found it to be of medium complexity. You have to connect it with the SQL database or your data source. You might not find it very straightforward.

It can also be deployed on-premises. If you have it on-premises, make sure that you meet all the prerequisites and have all permissions. You should sort these things out before deploying Power BI. I faced some issues because I missed one of the prerequisites, and it took me one month to get it resolved. That's why I recommend completing all prerequisites.

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

I am using the solution for data analytics.

I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs. As for now, I am able to do a lot of operations but not with much proficiency. I am just getting started with it. I am not very good at doing dashboard creation or writing reports but sometimes I do it during office hours to understand and learn the analytical tools.

I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it.

I have been using the solution for approximately one year.

I am only working with small datasets at the moment and the solution has been stable. I am not sure how it will be for larger datasets. We have approximately 50 people using the solution in my organization.

This solution came free, it was offered by Microsoft with our E3 license.

This solution is a useful tool for the business and experts. It has plenty of features. I do not have a lot of advice because I am just starting to explore the solution but I have found it very helpful in terms of data presentation. 

I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on. 

It should have more integrations.

I have been using this solution for probably two years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. I have a few large customers of this solution.

I don't have any experience with their support.

I also use Tableau. Tableau and Power BI are similar in terms of capability.

It was easy. It was done in minutes.

I can do it on my own. You would require external consultants or in-house experts.

Licensing is on a monthly basis, but I am not sure.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.

I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it.

The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. 

Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person.

It is not the right tool to do deeper analysis or predictions. When you have some data and you want to do some deep analysis, there is no feature to help you with this. 

I have been using this solution for one year.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

My team uses it. They majorly used to work on SSRS and SSIS.

It gives you an edge if you are on the Microsoft platform. If you have been using Microsoft products for a long time or if you have the Microsoft infrastructure, this is the right tool for you. It has seamless integration with Microsoft SQL Server and other sources, and you get the best of the three things (SSIS, SSAS, and SSRS) in one suite.

It should be more user-friendly and simple.

I have been using this solution for almost five years.

Their technical support is good.

Companies that are Microsoft shop do prefer using this solution, but non-Microsoft companies or customers generally go for solutions such as Tableau and Domo. Companies that want to go really cheap without any tool costs generally go for an open-source solution. In terms of reporting, data visualization tools such as Tableau and Domo are its competitors. 

The pricing of all these tools will vary depending upon the licenses that you are using and the contract that you have, but from the ease-of-use perspective, Tableau is very easy to work with. A lot of work is being done on Tableau.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for revenue forecasting and other predictive analytic reports based on specific requirements.

I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable.

I would like to see some AI incorporated into this solution in the future.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The stability of this solution is great.

The scalability at first was not the greatest but it has turned out it can be very good.

The support has been good.

I have found the installation straightforward compared to other competitors.

Having this solution on the could cloud allows for quick deployment. We could deliver the solution within four to eight weeks depending on the complexity.

There is a license for this solution and we purchase them annually.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

We use it for BI analytics. I am a data scientist, so I model data and show the data through dashboards using this tool.

I think that the best feature of this solution is the way you can plan, communicate, and visualize all the knowledge you extract from the data for the customers. I like the way you can show or visualize the information a client needs to answer a business question.

I think that they can make the solution easy to use for people who are not experts in data because many clients try to use it, but they need to be prepared before using it.

Also, now we have another solution on the market that is more easy to use for those who are not trained in these kinds of tools.

I have been using Microsoft BI for more than five years.

I think the stability is good. I haven't had any problems yet with Power BI.

My experience with technical support has been good.

For me, the initial setup was easy, but I have been working for more than 20 years in data analytics. However, sometimes for end-users it's not as easy as another tool on the market.

A dashboard can be made in 30 minutes or two days, depending on the client, the information, and the quality of the data. I am also a teacher, so for my classes I can create a low plan dashboard in 30 minutes.

I used to recommend Microsoft BI, but the only issue is that you would need to know data analytics before using it. So it is not easy to use if you're not an expert. However, it is a good tool, and I think it's a good solution for many business problems.

Also, I would rate Microsoft BI at eight on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use the solution across many company verticals and within every area of the company - including finance, accounting, operations, logistics, HR, et cetera.

In general, it's helping companies be more efficient, more productive.

There's not one specific feature we prefer. I would say it depends on the customer and the processes. What is important to one user may not be as important to another. There's no one feature that excels over another so that we don't see it like second place.

The product offers very good efficiency.

The solution is very stable.

The solution can scale well.

The documentation on offer is good.

We found the initial setup to be straightforward.

In Power BI, it would be ideal if we had the capability to import data with forms or similar methods.

It would be nice to have the ability to have a service price to offer customers of Power BI, without having the customer be part of Power BI, I would say. Maybe that could help us consult the suppliers.

The solution could use a faster speed on certain interactions and a refresh of the dashboards. It can sometimes get a bit slow.

I've been dealing with the solution for about five years or so. It's been a while.

The solution is extremely stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable in terms of performance, but it is slow sometimes.

The solution is easily scaled.

Most of our clients are quite large companies. The companies we deal with have thousands of users, however, only a few really use Power BI. Typically only the supervisors and managers use it, not everyone.

We've never used customer support. We haven't needed to reach out to them.

The documentation on offer is okay. It can help you troubleshoot or learn about the product.

We also work with Tableau and and QlikView alongside Microsoft. We do use some others, however, to a much lesser extent.

The initial setup is straightforward. The deployment takes a good two days to finalize.

In terms of maintenance, we have a support team that covers all of our customers. There isn't really that much that needs to be done. 

There are less expensive options on offer.

Tableau is always one of the solutions we would like to evaluate further, and ClickView is another one.

It is my understanding that ClickView is less expensive, whereas Tableau is more expensive. Really, the reason why most companies go through Microsoft is if they have a Microsoft Business Suite or Office and it's all tied in the same ecosystem. That's perhaps the biggest benefit. It's all within the same ecosystem.

We are consultants and implementers so we usually resell software. We do the end-to-end automation for customers as well. In the case of Microsoft BI, our clients are the ones that buy the license and use it. We don't necessarily use it directly.

We're always working off the latest version, as the solution is constantly updated online. 

I would recommend the solution to other companies and users. 

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

Around 50% of our customers use this solution. We plan to extend our usage of this solution.

Our customers really like the dashboard. They can click on whatever they want for an in-depth view. Microsoft BI is very easy to set up and use. 

In general, all the Microsoft programs are integrated quite well, but it could be improved. Also, integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved.

I have been using Microsoft BI on and off for the past two years. 

If implemented correctly, Microsoft BI is quite stable. 

It's quite scalable. 

I have never contacted customer support. 

I don't know much about the licensing because our customers pay for it. 

I would recommend this solution. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Microsoft BI a rating of nine. 

The solution is a dashboard. We have the on-premises data gateway, which allows us from the Azure Cloud to get into Power BI. The dataset content comes from the on-premise data warehouses.

We have produced historical analytics and KPIs from ServiceNow for Incident management, performance, SLA coverage, trends, and identifying anomalies. Anomalies are, for example, if a ticket is reopened, that means it was closed incorrectly or the solution was not correct. If a ticket has been an incident or a request has been routed more than two times, that means somewhere in the processes it was not clear and the ticket is going in circles out to the anomalies data.

A lot of analytics based on ServiceNow and Gyra as ITSMs systems. There is also combined analytics between Salesforce and for example, Web analytics, Google Analytics, and so on. Allowing us to see how visits to the website translate into lead opportunities. This is done by combining the two, extracting them and combining the two sources of data, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce.

Some of the most valuable features of this solution are the ability to take your data and have the possibility to combine them into datasets and have synchronization. 

You are able to synchronize the data without additional cost eight times a day and you can set when you want to synchronize it. For example, during business hours, we synchronize the data once an hour and during the night I do not synchronize it at all. 

The capability to add custom visuals and create Power BI apps. You can package datasets, synchronization details, and dashboards into a single app.

Microsoft is open to suggestions for improvements in future releases. We requested to allow Python Notebooks to be displayed as visuals on top of the datasets, which now available and was not five versions ago.

The possibility to synchronize more often without having to pay more would be great. They asked you to pay if you want to synchronize more than eight times, you would have to go to a Power BI enterprise license, which is much more costly.

I have been using the solution for three years.

I have found the solution to have high performance and to be reliable.

The solution is highly scalable. We have approximately 100 people using the solution in my organization.

The solution is a service, which does not require a traditional installation. However, there is a large configuration portion. It can be very simple to configure minor operations but can become complex if you connect via Power BI, a lot of sources.  For example, from on-premise and from multiple clouds. It allows you to go from very simple, to very complex. It is up to your solution design in the end. 

You can create your first dataset in a matter of hours. This once again is dependent on your configuration.

The solution requires maintenance but not to the Power BI itself. The configuration is deployed on top of Power BI, you can set automatic alerts if, for example, the data is not synchronized or It not available.

The price of the solution can be expensive if you want to synchronize your data more.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.