Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Microsoft BI Stack's best features are as follows:

SSRS – Self-service reporting and powerful subscription service

PowerBI – Self-service BI

MDS – Master data management

SSAS – OLAP Cube

Microsoft BI Stack improved the way our clients in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution) and the agro industrial sectors manage their financial reporting and board pack preparation, from one week to five minutes.

The following areas could be improved:

Publishing and sharing data using PowerBI.

People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training.

It's not always easy to speak directly with a MS Power BI expert.

You have to sign up to the Power BI service using an email address to share and view Power BI reports and dashboards, but Microsoft doesn't yet support personal (.cox, .gmail, et.) or government (.gov, .mil, etc.) email addresses.

I have been using the Microsoft BI Stack solution for over five years in the beverages (manufacturing and distribution), agro Industrial, and telecommunication sectors.

I have not yet encountered any issues with stability.

I have not yet encountered any issues with scalability.

I would rate the level of technical support as 7/10.

I did not previously use a solution.

The initial setup of the Microsoft BI Stack environment is complex, has many moving parts, and you need to know what you want for outputs to make effective use of it.

All in all, for the price, this is an excellent tool for helping your organization turn mounds of data into useful insights.

The following products were evaluated:

• QlikView
• Dundas

If you want to dazzle your audience and, at the same time, show meaningful insights, then this is the best tool.

Microsoft SSRS is a fantastic means for end users to access, run, and schedule delivery of reports. - Core functionality is simple to use for business users of all skill levels - Report models even allow end users to adjust their own reports using a model of your data - Report builder provides an even easier method for users to build their own reports - Report data can even be scheduled for periodic delivery with the report data as an attachmentMicrosoft SSAS is one of the best BI suites on the market. It is also one of the least expensive, and the features bundled rival competitors with prices many more times as expensive. - This feature is one of the most exciting areas of database technologies today - Very powerful and relatively easy to use when compared to other Bi suites

- Active Directory authentication requires an additional login for users without Internet Explorer - Learning curve behind any business intelligence package is quite steep - Price of the SQL Server bundle is potentially cost prohibitive for smaller businesses

I am quite passionate about the SQL Server suite of tools, and am a fervent user of SSRS. I use SSAS less, only because I am focused more on administration and have not moved into the SSAS space - yet. I am looking to head into the BI arena later on this year, and SSAS is my BI suite of choice!

I have found the most valuable feature of this solution is the Natural Language tool.

The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately four years.

The solution is stable.

I was satisfied with the technical support.

I rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

• It's a user-friendly tool
• Very stable
• It always helps us to achieve organizational goals

It's been stable for over eight years, and all the latest products/versions have backwards compatibility, or an upgrade facility. It has helped to fetch many projects, and to deliver them on time, as well as helping to resolve complex business challenges. The product has continual updates so we can stay on top of the market.

• Data warehousing manager is not available, which can be introduced
• Reporting or SharePoint needs a lot of learning so you can build reports

I've used it for 10 years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Microsoft has a great level of customer service.

Technical Support:

There are great public forums available for tech support.

• Straightforward - installation, development, deployment, and maintenance
• Little complex - Learning the tool

We did it in-house.

I am not sure how to calculate this. The solution significantly improved BI and reporting capabilities. Without this solution, the business can’t think of successful operations.

It is not costly when compared with other competitor products. This is a rock solid solution for any BI organization.

We didn't do much evaluation as our dev teams experience is with Microsoft BI.

This product is hassle free to utilize for your BI environment.

I am a consultant for a big company. We deal with energy companies, petroleum, sales companies and we deal with everything from financials to operations. We deal with market strategy and we provide consultancy services - I'm a part owner of the company. 

I like the CS, administration, most of the features are good as well as the technology.

I think creating dashboards could be easier. Compared to other solutions, the cost of the license is expensive and that could be improved. 

I've been using this solution for over 20 years. 

The stability is excellent. 

The scalability is excellent, all our professional consultants use it. Where we deploy in the banking sector, they can have 1,000 licensed users; in smaller companies there can be 50 users. 

Technical support is quite good, but I'd like to see a quicker response time. 

Deployment time depends on the company, it can take up to two months. 

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

On-premises

Power BI is a great tool for analytics. It is useful if you have a requirement to create a dashboard with self-service capability, along with KPIs, and you want to drill down to the data details.

I have tried SSRS and later moved to Power BI. SSRS requires every analytical feature to be implemented separately. However, with the appropriate granularity of data, you can drill down and drill up easily which gives you a different view of the dashboards. Now with having on-premises availability, it makes this tool even more powerful.

If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful.

The most valuable features are:

• Self service
• Inbuilt analytics
• Custom visualization
• Printing of dashboard helps a lot
• Dashboard scheduling
  
• Easy collaboration with other users on Power BI
• Learning curve for this tool is small
• Dashboard refresh rate can be configured
• Power BI works both on-premises and cloud

Adding paginated reports to this tool could be of great help for users who want to move away from SSRS. 

I would like to see built-in Git support, incremental loading of data, and a machine learning model for predictive analysis.

Custom colouring from the dashboard itself would be helpful.

I have been using Microsoft BI, SSRS, and Power BI for four years.

I have developed and deployed more than twenty separate customer solutions. I am a Business Intelligence Deployment Specialist. The most significant implementation was to reduce the Financial consolidation time for one hundred and twenty companies into one shareholder report, from thirty days to four minutes.

We help customers deploy and analyze sophisticated analytics models. These models have helped them all to get a better insight into their data and many of them have found very valuable insights that made them more profitable, more efficient, and in some cases changed the direction of the business.

The feature I find most valuable is the ability to publish Power Bi reports, using an embedded link, directly onto a website. Data that is not classified as confidential can very easily be exposed to customers, vendors, or even just visitors to the web site.

I would like to see Machine Learning for Power Bi Pro users or an intermediate license to enable Machine Learning if you don't have access to a Premium account.

The minimum embedded capacity for Machine learning is currently an A3 capacity, and this should be reduced to include A1 level licenses.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary.

It could have more of a hold on big data. Manipulating big data on this solution complicates things. This needs to be improved.

Also, we post NGDP data and manipulating this kind of data could be better.

The stability is good but sometimes we need to validate the data. 

Tech support helped us handle the implementation to completion. They were helpful.

I did not find any complexities with the setup. 

We are a Microsoft partner so we did not look at other solutions.