Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Across retail, logistics, legal, finance, and more, I use Power BI to craft custom solutions. From analyzing sales to optimizing operations, Power BI helps me extract actionable insights for informed decision-making across diverse industries.

I'm working with a law firm that has hundreds of professionals working across various areas for different clients. They struggle to accurately track hours worked per client and compare profitability. With Power BI, I can integrate data from their ERP systems and create insightful reports. These reports not only show the hours worked per client but also compare profitability between clients and highlight KPIs. By providing clear and actionable insights, Power BI helps the firm make informed decisions quickly, leading to improved profitability and efficiency.

The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs. By offering a range of visualization options and customization capabilities, Power BI enables users to quickly analyze data and gain actionable insights. Depending on the preferences and requirements of the customer, different visualization styles can be utilized, from simple and standardized views to more colorful and dynamic charts and graphs.

Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds. While Power BI is a powerful tool, mastering its development aspects, including coding and formulas, can be challenging for those without a technical background. Additionally, some users find the default visualizations in Power BI Desktop to be outdated and prefer more modern and customizable options. 

One additional feature I would like to see in Power BI is tighter integration with Power Apps. This would allow for easier development without extensive coding, making it more accessible for users who aren't familiar with technical aspects like JSON files or Visual Studio Code. Simplifying the development process would streamline workflow and enhance overall usability.

I have been working with Microsoft Power BI since 2016.

I would rate the stability of Power BI at around nine out of ten. It has been consistently reliable over the past year, and any bugs are quickly addressed by a supportive community.

Power BI is scalable, but its scalability depends on factors like the amount of data, infrastructure, and database type. For large BI data, other tools might be more suitable. However, Power BI offers great flexibility, and its scalability varies based on specific needs and circumstances.

The technical support for Power BI is generally good, but it can be limited in handling diverse customer needs. While Microsoft technicians are highly knowledgeable, they may provide standard solutions based on their expertise, which might not cover all possible scenarios. Finding solutions often requires additional research, practice, and exploration of community resources. Overall, I would rate the support at a nine out of ten.

Positive

Deploying Power BI isn't difficult, but it requires time and experience. With regular updates and new features from Microsoft, staying current and understanding changes can be a continuous learning process. While it is manageable with experience, teaching someone from scratch would require significant time and effort.

The price of Power BI is very good. It is reasonable.

Power BI has revolutionized our reporting and decision-making processes. Instead of spending hours manually working with static data in Excel, we now have dynamic information at our fingertips. With Power BI, we can quickly make queries, access answers, and generate reports in minutes. By efficiently extracting data from databases and creating visually appealing visuals, such as KPI dashboards, Power BI enables us to identify trends, compare data, and make informed decisions promptly. It streamlines the entire process, from data extraction to visualization, saving us time and providing valuable insights for effective decision-making.

My advice for someone looking to use Power BI would be to start with the Pro license, as it is usually sufficient for most users. If you are dealing with a large number of customers, consider consulting with a Microsoft partner to find the best licensing solution. Based on my experience, I would recommend Power BI to others. Overall, I would rate the product as a nine out of ten.

I use the platform primarily to create visualizations and reports from data to gain insights. It is utilized for operational, decision-making, and managerial reports.

The product's most valuable features are DAX functions for formulas and calculations.

I would suggest improvements in visualization standards, particularly in customization and appearance, to match tools like Tableau.

I have been working with Microsoft Power BI for two years.

I rate the platform stability a seven and a half or eight out of ten. 

The product is suitable for medium-sized companies with straightforward requirements. It can handle thousands of users, but its effectiveness depends on the data volume and reporting needs.

I rate the scalability an eight. 

The technical support team's response quality can vary based on the engineer's expertise and availability.

Power BI is more cost-effective, whereas Tableau provides more advanced features and higher-quality visualizations. For critical business needs and high data volumes, Tableau might be more suitable. 

The initial setup process is simple. 

I have worked with both the cloud version and the desktop model. Each has its advantages depending on the need for high-quality visualizations or the volume of data.

I rate the product pricing a ten. 

The solution supports integration from various applications well enough to meet most business requirements. 

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

During my internship, I used Microsoft Power BI to create reports for a project we were working on. I also made a dashboard to help a company grow its business.

What I liked most about the tool is that we can use text queries to create projects and modify columns according to our needs. There are hundreds of YouTube courses on how to use it. 

I found data cleaning in the solution to be quite difficult. If I could add a feature, I'd include Excel's Flash Fill function. This allows you to set a formula for one row and column and automatically apply it to thousands of rows, making data sorting much easier.

I found the tool to be a stable product. One of my favorite features is connecting a SQL database to the tool to generate real-time reports. I was part of a group of 80+ students, but only five of us, including me, were offered internships and could use Microsoft Power BI.

I haven't contacted the solution's support yet. 

Installing Power BI is easy—there are free and paid versions available. I used the free version, which you can download from the Microsoft Store and install, similar to installing an app on your phone.

I used the tool's free version. 

I'd recommend Microsoft Power BI for report generation - it's great software. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

In terms of impact, Power BI significantly improved decision-making and instilled confidence in our data. It also resulted in cost savings by avoiding the purchase of expensive Oracle integration tools like ODI. These savings were crucial for our fast-growing company, allowing scalability without increasing expenditure.

The most effective feature of Microsoft Power BI for data analysis is the ability to use Power Query directly from Excel. Power BI's integration capabilities impacted our data management by allowing us to push all reporting down to the end user, giving them the capability to perform "what if" scenarios and discover and validate their own data without needing to refer to IT. Additionally, it provided insights that we couldn't get from Oracle Cloud. We wrote an extract routine to transfer our Oracle Cloud database to Power BI, which was a game changer in terms of giving people confidence in the finances.

It was easy to implement Microsoft Power BI into our existing infrastructure, but integrating it with Oracle Cloud was very difficult. The integration with Oracle Cloud required us to build a sophisticated database replication process because the APIs for Oracle Cloud are very restricted in terms of volume, depth, and complexity of queries. However, the part of implementing Power BI into our infrastructure was very easy. It required almost no tech input because it was all part of Office 365. To overcome the integration issues, we developed an extract and update process, although it was quite complicated and involved a lot of IP.

Power BI excels in integrations and its ability to handle various data sources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more seamlessly with cloud interfaces like Oracle Cloud, although I understand the challenges with Oracle's policies on database access. Another area for improvement would be enhancing error messaging, especially when working with Dataverse and M Code for automation.

I have been using Microsoft Power BI for the past ten years.

I would rate Power BI overall as an eight. It's a very powerful tool for users, which I appreciate. However, there are some areas that could be improved.

As for AI-driven decision processes, I believe Power BI supports them, although we haven't utilized those features ourselves.

I use it primarily for some application services. It's primarily for government statistics.

I use it for visualization as well, mainly for filtering data, and creating graphs and dashboards.

Power BI helped me to improve the decision-making process. It was particularly useful when I had data in a table, and I was able to use it as a dashboard with filters for better insights.

The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards.

It's quite manageable and easy to learn. It took me about a month to learn how to use it effectively.

Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports.

I have been using it for a year. 

It is a stable product. I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. 

It is a scalable product but it could be improved to better suit the overall size of projects.

I would rate the scalability a seven out of ten. 

There are around 50 end users in my organization. We plan to increase the further usage.

The customer service and support are not as easy to access as I'd like. I don't often find a direct portal to support. I end up looking up the internet. I would rate it one out of ten, but I would put it a five out of ten. 

I have to go and look up the internet. I sometimes just bring in expertise. I would prefer some tech support instead of bringing in someone else. 

I have to run a case. I want to have something easy and readily accessible. There is good stuff on the website, but it would be better if I could easily ring somebody. 

Neutral

I've used Tableau, but now we primarily use Power BI.

Each has its advantages, but Power BI supports our needs effectively.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being easy to set up. 

We use it on the cloud. For us, deployment took six months.

The pricing is reasonable, at about 6.3 euros per user per month.

I'd recommend it for its features and cost-effectiveness. I find this product pretty okay. It works well for me. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have many projects in the company. Some of them are self-service where they can connect on their own to local on-premises databases. Some of them are with big databases on the cloud, such as Azure SQL or Azure Synapse, and some of them are with local sources, such as Excel files, etc.

It is really flexible. The charts and reports are really nice. You have the flexibility of self-service.

It is not yet ready for enterprises. For a big enterprise data model, it is not so stable, and it also doesn't scale so well.

I am not really satisfied with their support. Their support should be faster. They should also be more knowledgeable.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years.

It depends. It is not really for enterprises. Even though Microsoft is trying, it isn't yet ready for enterprise use. For self-service, it is pretty fine. If you don't have a huge data set, it is quite stable.

If you try to have a big enterprise data model, it doesn't scale so well. You wouldn't get results similar to some of the other on-premises tools.

In terms of its users, I don't know the exact number, but we have about 10,000  to 20,000 users. Its usage is increasing.

I have contacted them a lot of times. I am not really satisfied with their support. Lately, it has become even worse. They are probably overloaded, and it takes really long. Many times, they just say, "That's how it works." In reality, it is a bug.

Many times, their first-level support doesn't understand what the problem is, and they don't reach out to the proper people to get into the issue. It is not really good.

We have been using different tools, such as QlikView, on-premises OBIEE, Tableau, Excel, etc. We are trying to migrate almost everyone to Power BI. So, eventually, we will have only Power BI. Its usage is growing.

It is really easy. It is mostly automated. You simply publish the dataset. 

It doesn't take too long. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes.

I'm a part of the team that manages all the projects that are done with Power BI within the company. We guide them and help them with the development and all the architecture.

The number of people required depends on the size of the project. For one of the big projects we have, there are a couple of developers. There is one person for the management of Power BI. We also have 10 to 12 people doing the reports, etc.

We have premium licenses, but you can use it for free. You can share the content with anyone else, so you can use it for free.

I would recommend it, but if you want to use it enterprise-wide, you need to be really careful because you might face problems. In general, it's really a great tool. For self-service, it is more than okay, but when you try to use it enterprise-wide, it doesn't really work well.

Overall, I would rate it a seven out of 10.

A client used Power BI mainly for banking reports. Another client was working in the field of laboratories, and they requested Power BI for the analysis of laboratory-related data for COVID-19. There were also some use cases where we used predictive analytics or utilized the power of Power BI services in the cloud.

It can be deployed on-premises and on the cloud.

It helps in automating the process of filling the data or refreshing the data to give you timely calculations for all the aspects of the dashboards that you have built. You can easily see all the real-time data with Power BI.

The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R.

You can integrate it with the cloud. On the desktop level, you just install the desktop installer, which is about a hundred megabytes or something like that, and it connects to the cloud. So, on the desktop, you can utilize the cloud power for AI and machine learning to help you with predictive analytics.

Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them.

I have been using this solution for six years.

It is stable. Solving dashboard issues on other products, such as Oracle, took us a lot of time, whereas solving issues in Power BI was so simple. The language they're using is also easy. In Power BI, you use the DAX language, which is derived from Excel. So, anyone who knows how to write Excel code would know how to deal with Power BI. It is going to be so simple.

The cloud version is scalable.

It is super easy to set up. I've been giving training on this to new employees, and they quickly learn how to work with the whole product. It doesn't take them more than one or two sessions.

The installation of Power BI Desktop on a computer takes a maximum of 10 minutes. You just have to install it on the computer, and that's it. Most of the services are over the cloud. When you do the subscription, you just connect or sign in with your company email address that has been registered, and that's it.

The on-premises version requires extra staff. It requires an engineer who knows how to implement AI algorithms and then connect them to the offline Power BI solution.

Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level.

They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it.

It has an on-premises version as well as a cloud version. I usually recommend people to work with the cloud version. In the on-premises version, if they want it to go with the artificial intelligence part, they are going to require engineers to configure it, whereas it is already there in the cloud version. It is already configured and affordable. The cloud version costs between $9 to $20 per user, which makes it very affordable, and you also have the capacity option, which costs about $4,000 per month per capacity. The capacity option is usually for huge enterprises. Regular companies, even banks, can work efficiently with the cheapest option, which is $9 to $20 per user.

After working with Power BI, I would rate it an eight out of 10. There is huge competition in the market when it comes to BI tools, and there are fractional differences between Power BI and some of its competitors.

We built a BI system to provide clients with access to the data that we collect. They can access the data report and various reports by using Power BI.

It is built into the Azure cloud. You can't deploy it otherwise.

We have a product called ED Tracker, and we allow clients to subscribe to this product, and they use it through Power BI. It enables us to offer new services to clients and basically allows them to work on the data or report themselves, rather than sending them data with PowerPoint decks, PDF reports, etc. So, we work with our clients through this platform. They need to have the license. If they want to access the system, we just tell them that they need to get a license. The license is very cheap. It is $10 a month per user. It is not very expensive, and once they have the license, they can access our cloud solution.

Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly.

It is an evolving solution. So, it still has some rough edges. As compared to Tableau or QlikView, there are some things that you can't do when you want to. For example, giving specific access to some reports for users. You can get it up and running very fast, but some things are a bit trickier, and for some of the things, you need to actually write code. 

It is sort of a work in progress. They're catching up on the competition, but it still takes time. Other solutions are more mature, and they have been in the market much longer, but it is catching up. It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better.

There should be the ability to export to PowerPoint or PDF. It should be more efficient. It's rather clunky right now. Sometimes, the system is inconsistent in the way it does things. 

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is adequate in terms of speed and stability. It is very stable. Sometimes, it is a bit slow. It can be faster, but you need to subscribe and purchase additional packages or resources, and then it becomes more expensive.

We haven't scaled yet, but you have the ability to have a dedicated server on Azure with CPU. You can increase and have an SQL Server, so you can scale it.

As of now, we have around 10 to 12 users internally and externally. Some are internal, and some are external clients. We do have plans to increase the usage because we're trying to sell and market the product to other clients as well. So, we do have plans to increase the number of users. One of the benefits is that it doesn't matter if we have 10, 20, or 50 users. It doesn't inflict any costs on us because they go directly to the cloud. They don't come to us. It is very indirect, but we do plan to extend the usage of that system. We might also extend it internally.

Their technical support is absolutely magnificent. A week ago, we had an issue related to permissions, and we couldn't find out how to do that. My colleague contacted the support of Power BI. They not only answered us by mail; they also had a half an hour session with us on Teams to better understand what our issues were. They wanted us to send them the files. They reviewed them and told us that there were still some limitations, but they were working on them, and they will let us know.

We were stunned that someone from Microsoft is interested in what we're doing and someone is willing to go online and have a half an hour session with us so that we can explain what we're doing and what is our issue, and they can think about how to resolve it. We're a small client. We're not a big company. So, we were stunned by their support. Their support is amazing.

A few years ago, we've tested QlikView and Qlik Sense. Their deployment costs were rather high, so we decided to use Power BI.

It was very easy and straightforward. It was rather quick because you can launch it. It is very easy to publish. They give you direct access to their cloud. For small solutions or datasets like ours, the initial setup was a matter of days. We started with the desktop on-premise, and then we published it to the cloud. It was rather easy. It was a matter of days to a week or two.

We used our own team. Its deployment and maintenance are taken care of by a PM and a colleague of mine. It is very easy. You just press publish, and it's off to the cloud.

In terms of ROI, it is a 10 out of 10.

Its price is very low. It is like $10 per user, per month. The clients pay for their own licenses. It is not on us. 

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. That's the beauty. With other systems, you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started, and then you need to spend $500 per year for the license, which becomes much more costly. You have a system here where for $120 to $140 a year, you can start with two people and start developing and deploying. You can see why the cost difference is huge, especially when you are on a low scale, like us, and you're not building something very huge.

We didn't evaluate other options because we have had some past experience with other solutions. We knew that QlikView might be good, but you need to spend a couple of thousand dollars just to get started if you want to do something. We knew the costs, and the entry cost was much higher. So, we decided to go with Power BI. It is also integrated with Office and Excel, so it's very easy to go along and do some of the things that you can do in Excel. It is very easy to transition between them.

If you are looking for a good BI solution for a small business that is very easy to deploy and not costly and that can use the cloud in terms of security, Power BI is probably the best solution in the market.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There are other solutions that might be better than this, but they're more costly. It is the cheapest BI solution in the market. It is not the best in terms of features, but it is the best in terms of value for money. For the volume of work that we have, there is absolutely no competition.