Microsoft Power BI Reviews

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.

We get a lot of chunks of data, especially production data and data based on education — performance-related data. We use BI to analyze the data so we can give feedback to our clients. If they're experiencing problems, we help them find trends, etc.

Within our organization, there are roughly six or seven people using this solution.

Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset. It automatically renders some of the information which makes things a lot easier for us.

Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do a more in-depth analysis and represent the findings. I think they have a standard that they keep to.

As the UI experience is always changing, the interface and security can always be improved. 

I have been using this solution for roughly four years. 

Stability is quite good. It's reliable.

We haven't had to expand because usually we just wait for the data. However, we do have plans to expand.

On a scale from one to five, I would give their technical support a rating of four. 

The initial setup was very straightforward. 

I believe we pay on a monthly basis. Compared to what's available on the market, I think we pay a fair price.

I would recommend Microsoft BI to others. On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven.

It is good for us for onboarding the data. We can connect to multiple data sources, do transformations to make the data usable, and then model it within the transformation.

Someone who has come from a Microsoft Excel environment will easily be able to use this solution. Power query and report modeling are easy to understand in this solution.

Their technical support is very good. They are extremely responsive, helpful, and hands-on.

The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. 

Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire.

I have been using this solution for about two and a half years. We use Power BI Premium, and we have its latest version.

It is scalable once you've got your ducks in a row. We live in a world of fast-paced data. The business I am working in is dealing with a lot of unstructured data, so it has to go through the data onboarding transformation piece. It is more scalable if it connects to a data warehouse, but connecting to an Excel spreadsheet or unstructured data requires enormous amounts of investment. I have seen some other tools that are more data wrangling tools, so you don't want to blur your line. You need to stick to what you're good at. Is it data visualization and modeling, or is it data transformation? They're trying to diversify and make the tool all-encompassing, but we're now having to use a different tool for data transformation or data wrangling. We then just connect it to a data warehouse, and it becomes a really slick and scalable tool.

They are very good. They are extremely responsive and helpful. They arrange a call quite quickly, and they actually get on the call and help you and do troubleshooting with you. They are not sending you to the Q&A page. They are quite hands-on in terms of support. So, I am really happy with their support.

I would advise others to just make sure that whatever you're going to deploy can be scaled out. You should get your data modeling in place first. 

I would recommend this solution. They have so many releases every month, which is quite cool. They are keeping on top of it, and it is not like you have to wait six months for a release. I'm still trying to keep up with the releases of the last four or five months.

I would rate Power BI a nine out of ten.

We are using it for analyzing transactions. In the products that we develop and supply to our customers, there are some applications that are connected to payments. We analyze the trend of transactions or payments that are done in our system by our clients. We want to understand how our clients are using our solution and if there are some conditions that are making them use our product more than others. We also analyze who is paying and how much, and how and at what time are they using our system.

It is stable enough. It has a lot of powerful functions. It can also be customized with the DAX language. 

It is also intuitive enough and incremental. You can start with something simple, and then step-by-step, you can increase the reports and dashboards according to your needs. 

When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing.

Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue.

It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable enough.

It is easy to make it grow as a product. Our organization is not big. We have a total of 10 to 15 people who access this solution. We will continue to use it for sure. 

In general, we are producing applications that we sell to our clients in a SaaS model. All data of our clients is inside our database. The clients have to manage the service. All this data that they are loading in our server can have interesting information for them. So, we are using it to understand our clients and the behavior of the user.

We had to use some support for licensing. They were fast enough, but sometimes, they were not very clear. We had a few calls with them. In the end, they solved the problem, but they didn't have a very clear approach. It was more of a communication problem. Their support can be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. 

Its installation is easy on the cloud as well as on the desktop. You can also easily move and publish from desktop to the cloud. We had issues with licensing, but after you have received licenses, it is easy. 

It is also good how the data that is being collected on some servers for different data centers is automatically synchronized. It is easy enough to do automatic scaling or collect the data from the source and the publisher.

We did it ourselves. At the moment, we are not using a consultant. It is intuitive enough for our use, and there is one type of analysis and one type of role. However, in the future, we might require a consultant for customizing the dashboard and the reports and splitting the data according to different roles. We would require analysis of different roles based on different sets of data. For machine learning, we'll surely require a consultant.

For its deployment and maintenance, we have three or four people for each specific competency. Some of them are more experienced in the data that has to be collected, and some of them are experienced in how data can be collected from the in-house server. There are also some people who are more competent in the business domain.

We pay for users who are publishing on the cloud. The desktop version is free.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution. It has many features that are good. It mostly needs improved licensing. 

I would rate Power BI a nine out of ten. 

Our primary use case of this solution is as a reporting tool. We implement it for our clients. I'm a consultant in business intelligence and we are customers of Microsoft BI.

I like this product because it's a free software, very intuitive and very easy to use.

The capacity of the solution could be improved. If you don't need all the data it offers then don't download it because the software slows down. 

I've been using this product for the last year. 

It's a stable solution. 

The initial setup is quite straightforward. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10.