Currently, it is used in our financial reporting and financial consideration reports.
Senior Oracle Application Consultants at Saudi Telecom Company
Easy to set up with good functionality and an easy initial setup
Pros and Cons
- "Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially."
- "We need more integration capabilities."
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
It is stable.
It has good functionality and is fully integrated with Microsoft products. If you have already a direct connection or direct integration with Microsoft products, it is very good actually. In some cases, we just developed our BI dashboard and sent it to PowerPoint, for example. It'll be published as the power BI format, which is very good as a feature, to have that capability to just easily populate everything in PowerPoint.
Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially.
It's pretty user-friendly.
The product can scale.
What needs improvement?
Our main concern with Power BI is it doesn't have a connection with the finance application. Power BI is used to present some financial data. However, if there is no direct connection or a ready API to be connected either to Oracle ERP or SAP or a different ERP, it won't be very useful. We need more integration capabilities.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using the solution for five years.
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Power BI
September 2025

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Power BI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability has been great. If a company needs to expand it, it can.
In my organization, there are about 10 to 20 users. The majority have shifted to Qlick.
How are customer service and support?
I haven't contacted technical support in the past. The product has been so stable we haven't needed assistance.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have multiple BI tools. We previously worked with Oracle BI. Our expectations were not met, and therefore we moved over to Microsoft BI.
In my sector, currently, we are using Qlik Sense. We started using it one year ago.
We are shifting from Microsoft to Qlik due to the fact that we have Oracle ERP as a back end. We are trying to find a technology or BI, which already has a direct connection with this ERP. We went into Qlik Sense for that reason.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward, actually. It is like any other Microsoft product. All of Microsoft's products are straightforward. It isn't complicated. This is one of the main benefits.
I'm not sure how long the deployment process was. I can't speak to how big the technical team was that handled the rollout.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We pay an annual licensing fee.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend the solution if they already have a Microsoft ERP system. If they have already Microsoft and they have already their financial system in place and if they don't have data movement, Power BI will be very powerful. If a company has different financial systems, they have to track all these data points first, build the business model and then import it to Power BI.
I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Data Analytics Specialist at GlaxoSmithKline
Useful for non-engineers and provides helpful insights
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with."
- "This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
What is our primary use case?
My primary use case of Power BI is to generate dashboards and reports based on past data. Especially for people who aren't engineers, like purely business people, Power BI is helpful because it allows them to analyze and assess their complete business solutions end to end. Power BI provides insights that can help company growth, in terms of revenue and ROI. This solution is cloud-based.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with.
What needs improvement?
This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low.
Other than that, their licensing costs could be lowered. Microsoft handles everything. For example, if I want to publish a report order from Powerpay, Microsoft doesn't allow me to do this. It's a complete business, but the licensing is very costly. I don't think Microsoft will change their pricing system, though.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Power BI for the past five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Power BI can handle a maximum of one to four gigabytes of data, but the performance becomes very slow if you handle big data. Since this solution is cloud-based, it's always updated to the latest version.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The development is very easy because it depends on each computer. Power BI is a desktop solution that you install on your computer. Once I complete my development, I publish through the internet, which the external users are using. The number of users doesn't matter.
How are customer service and support?
There is a Power BI community, which I'm very happy about. They're there for anything and they're very helpful. In the past, Microsoft has helped us with infrastructure problems.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In the past, I worked with other Python data visualization tools like Dash and Panel. Compared to those tools, Power BI is very easy.
How was the initial setup?
The installation is very straightforward. I did it myself and it took barely ten minutes.
What about the implementation team?
I implemented this solution myself.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You don't need a license for the development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Another visualization tool I've heard of is Splunk, which helps to handle and visualize huge amounts of data. In the future, if Power BI is unable to handle this sort of streaming data, I may consider switching to Splunk. When I extract huge amounts of data with Denodo, Power BI becomes very slow—for example, it takes more time for the display to load. Right now, Power BI can handle a maximum of around one to four gigabytes, whereas Splunk can handle very large amounts of data.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Power BI an eight out of ten. I recommend this solution because it's the best visualization tool I have ever worked with, but the licensing is costly.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Power BI
September 2025

Learn what your peers think about Microsoft Power BI. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Inovation Manager at SoCalGas
Beneficial query editor, scalable, and stable
Pros and Cons
- "My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
- "Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop."
What is our primary use case?
We use Microsoft BI all over our enterprise but our main use is for the organizational dashboard. My organization sends all of our systems and ERP data into a Power BI dashboard, which goes to all the managers, the leadership, and then gets reported up to the company executives.
How has it helped my organization?
Microsoft BI has helped out the organization because it has brought visibility of our data across the organization allowing everyone to see the same metrics.
What is most valuable?
My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations.
What needs improvement?
Microsoft BI could improve by having better collaboration between developers working on the same dashboard. The developer platform is all done on a single laptop and it's difficult to have the same project files work. Two developers have to go back and forth. You have to have the project file on one developer's laptop making it difficult to co-develop.
In terms of the performance, it could always improve sometimes. It's only slow to update. The automated data feeds have to be all updated.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Microsoft BI for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of Microsoft BI is very good. We have not had an issue.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Microsoft BI has scaled very well for us. We have a very large organization with users all across the company.
We have approximately 100 users using this solution. It's a standard program for analysts and even managers will use it. It is a standard business analyst software.
The solution is extensively being used in our organization.
How are customer service and support?
I have not contacted Mircosoft for technical support. I only use our internal support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used SAS and it is similar to Microsoft BI. It's a little different in the visualization. It was more on analytics, but it also had the visualization.
We had SAS Enterprise Guide which was on-premise. When they were looking at cloud solutions, they kind of opened it up for more possibilities. The deciding factors of why we switched to Microsoft BI was we already had many Microsoft products and we have a SQL Server Data Warehouse. There's good integration between our existing Microsoft systems with Microsoft BI.
How was the initial setup?
I was part of the initial user testing of Microsoft BI, but it was mostly IT that handled all the initial implementation.
What about the implementation team?
We have a dedicated IT team of two administrators that support Microsoft BI. One of the administrator's full-time job is to manage the Microsoft BI.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is to do some training. There is enough training curriculum available to get people going.
I rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Owner at Pranali Consultants
Straightforward to setup, constantly updated, and very stable
Pros and Cons
- "The solution is quite scalable."
- "Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution."
What is our primary use case?
The data is captured by transaction processing systems, and even when the data is captured by a very sophisticated enterprise resource planning system, or ERP system, such as SAP. We'll find that that data is organized in a manner that is suited for the data updated. Therefore, when data has to be used for decision making, it has to be reoriented and organized in a manner that is suitable for data analysis and further for predictive analytics also. What we do is pull out data from multiple data sources, either on SAP or somewhere else.
There could be a certain budget or plan or target-related data on some other platform or on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. The data is stored at different places. Some data could be on your internet platforms. Wherever it is, we pull out the data. Then we get that into the SQL server and we organize it in a manner that's suitable for further creation of dashboards and analytics applications, which can be used for better decision making.
How has it helped my organization?
The company has been able to make better decisions, due to the fact that, when we prepare business intelligence or data analytics applications, they are used by very similar decision-makers, as well as middle-level management decision-makers. From the same infrastructure, the data is used by even the report consumers. You can consider three layers of users, report consumers, mid-level use, as in, those who do interactive analysis of data, and decision-makers. Right at the top, those who would like to see the key performance indicators and use them for deciding a course of action can do so. All of our applications have been providing functionality for all these types of needs, including risk and compliance.
What is most valuable?
The solution offers many features, however, just the way in which that product is designed is quite useful for us.
The way in which it can connect to multiple data sources is also very useful. The way in which data can be manipulated by using data analysis expressions has also been a good feature for us.
The solution is stable.
The solution is quite scalable.
Our clients seem to be happy with the level of technical support they receive.
With our experience, the initial setup is straightforward.
Microsoft is often updating the solution adding new helpful features.
What needs improvement?
I'm not a product expert as such, however, I am aware that Microsoft comes out with a newer version, which is really downloadable and it's replaced every month. Therefore, the improvement is continuous. Since Microsoft provides a free downloadable desktop version of our BI. That desktop portion gets a new version which comes every month, we can replace the older version.
Their ecosystem is quite good in terms of adding new features, in terms of adding custom visuals or adding many more interfaces or reporting features and more functionality within existing reporting and graphs. We don't have much to complain about except that they can always add many more features as they go.
Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution since its inception. We've used it for a very long time. We have been in this domain for the past 30 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is quite stable. That's why it is right at the top, of Gartner's quadrant. We have deployed it with hundreds of users and it's withstood the test of time.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution is quite scalable. Of course, it requires data strategy just like any solution or any tool.
We tend to have 100 to 200 users at a minimum using the solution.
The solution is extensively deployed. We have plans to use it on an ongoing basis. They come out with new versions and new features every month, and this constant updating and iteration of the product have really been very helpful for us to provide more advanced solutions.
How are customer service and support?
In terms of technical support, we don't really deal with it. Normally, our clients have a contract with Microsoft, however, my understanding is that their experience is good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were using a CA tool and we have done work on Oracle. We have done work on many such platforms. However, since 2008 or 2009, we have been focusing on Microsoft as the total cost of ownership has been quite reasonable.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is quite straightforward.
Our implementation strategy involved a business requirement phase where we sought out to understand exactly the expectations for a particular project. Then there is was a design phase where we decided on a data strategy of pulling data from multiple data switches. After that, there was a dashboard design phase, which includes wireframing of dashboards and then designing the dashboards according to those wireframes. Finally, we deploy and in that phase, we put in role level security, et cetera, and deploy it at an enterprise level. The entire process tasks three to four months in total, end-to-end.
We don't require much maintenance due to our maturity in design and development. We have been monitoring sites without having to add too many resources at our end as we have a robust design and maybe one person can handle four to five.
What about the implementation team?
We do the implementation on our own. We have deep experience in this area, and we have developed two types of processes that we use to deploy our solutions. One is the data approach, where you know all best practices and methodologies are embedded into that thing. That framework gives a hundred percent assurance in terms of the success of that project. We have also developed a presentation layer framework whereby different subject areas are designed with very indicative dashboards and those dashboards can be quickly adapted to any data. That way, rather than starting from scratch, we use this framework which helps us to deploy our solution quite successfully. It's very fast also. We save around 50% to 55% of the time this way.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We don't deal directly with licensing. That said, certainly, we are aware in terms of what the Microsoft BI license costs. If it has to be applied on the cloud, then it costs around $10 per month per user. For a pro license and for a premium license it's around $20 per month per user. If it has to be applied on-premises then, depending on the course of your server, you have to buy a software assurance version of the database.
They don't charge for additional features. If you want a premium capacity to handle your work or job, then there is a separate license available. That is a premium license, which is available with the entire product managed by Microsoft and you can use lot more features, including Azure, et cetera.
What other advice do I have?
We are Microsoft partners.
We have two deployment options. Some of our clients have deployed the cloud solution. Some are deployed on-premises.
Anybody who has worked on existing spreadsheet-based solutions can quickly adapt to Microsoft BI and the data visualization and interactive data features, they'll find it very exciting to use and very fast to adapt to it. It's a very effective solution.
I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Manager.Marketing Strategy & Analysis. at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Integrates well, secure, but cannot handle large databases
Pros and Cons
- "The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well."
- "If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3."
What is our primary use case?
We are using this solution for analytic dashboards.
What is most valuable?
The solution integrates with other Microsoft solutions very well.
When it comes to security Microsoft BI can integrate well with Microsoft Domain Services, you are able to make it as secure as you want.
There are useful visualizations available in the dashboards.
What needs improvement?
If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3.
In a future release, they need to have better integration to allow any visualization that is done in other solutions, such as D3 or Tableau, to be able to be imported in Microsoft BI easily.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is stable when the database is reasonably sized. If you have large databases of 20 million rows it can begin to have difficulties requiring a purchase of more hardware.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is good. If you have a direct query, Microsoft BI can run on billions of rows of data.
Microsoft BI is available to the 70,000 users in my organization.
This solution is used extensively because everyone has access to it, not because it is the best.
How are customer service and technical support?
The support from Microsoft could improve.
How was the initial setup?
The solution is easy to install.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation of the solution.
For those customers we have that use Microsoft BI on a dedicated server, we have a technical team that does the maintenance.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated Tableau and D3.
What other advice do I have?
I would recommend Microsoft BI over Tableau if you are comfortable with Microsoft solutions. Additionally, understand your use case and choose the best solution that fits your needs.
I rate Microsoft BI a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
Owner at BNS
Reliable with good reporting, easy to setup, can capable of scaling
Pros and Cons
- "The reports are easy to create."
- "The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually."
What is our primary use case?
We are software developers. We generate data using the basic data connectors that Microsoft provides. We just follow the importing and exporting data around, the Azure platform.
We are doing C# development. We use an SQL server, and we use Power BI. Those are the main three technologies, and then it's just Microsoft to put it together.
We use this solution to create business intelligence reports for the executive users of our applications. We are creating standard business applications like ERP and CRM and e-commerce type applications. Then, we extract a sample of the data, build a simple data warehouse, in the Power BI service, and create some BI reports.
What is most valuable?
The data visualisation is very attractive from the user's point of view. Users see their reports and think "Wow - that is amazing".
However, it is much harder to prepare data for reporting. I would say 95% of your development time is spent gathering, cleaning, and modelling data. However once that is done reporting is easy.
What needs improvement?
The capacity needs improvement. It is limited in its capacity in power.
Some of its features are incredibly difficult to understand. There is a learning curve to do the more sophisticated things. For example, paginated reports are complicated. But in general, Power BI, it's not an end-user tool, however much Microsoft pretended it is. We just treat it is like another tool that we use and we deliver the reports to our clients.
The orchestration module for refreshing data flows is something that is missing and we have to do it manually. It should be one of the admin features of Microsoft BI.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Microsoft BI for 15 months.
We are using the latest version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is a reliable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I haven't tried to scale it, but in theory, I know that is capable. Power BI Premium is easy to scale as long as you have the money.
Inside the business, we only have one user, and outside the business, we have our clients where we have four developers who use this solution.
Our clients are medium-sized companies with 50 to 100 users.
How are customer service and technical support?
I have not contacted technical support. Google provides the information that we need.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward.
It can take a couple of hours to deploy the gateways, then there is the development of it.
It doesn't require maintenance, but we are forever enhancing the reports. In general, it works without problems.
What about the implementation team?
We are developers, we can complete the installation ourselves.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
We view it as an expensive product.
Most of our clients cannot afford the premium capacity.
We just make do with Power BI pro features, which is always a big shame because we know that the premium version has a lot of features that we would like to use, and are not available to us.
There are a few different licensing models.
It ends up being complicated and people don't like paying for things. It's okay if you're working for a large corporation because they can obviously spend thousands of pounds every month on licenses, but our customers cannot.
Licensing is paid on a monthly basis.
What other advice do I have?
Power BI has approximately 20 new features that come out every month. You just have to be patient and eventually, the features come out.
My advice to others would be to do your homework. It's one of those things where you have to get past the marketing. The marketing message is not helpful.
I would suggest that if you are going to use Power BI, you need to use developers who understand what it can do, what it can't do, and how it works.
Then they will then guide you to say, this is the type of report you can expect.
It took me a long time to realize what you can and cannot do with Power BI.
That's why I suggest doing your homework first. It's not as wonderful as Microsoft pretends it to be, but it's not bad, and I am not knocking it, but you have to cut out all the hype that comes with it.
I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
Operations & BI Analyst at American Hospital Dubai
A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)
Pros and Cons
- "Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."
- "It should be more user-friendly. There are very small or tiny icons that you need to move very carefully. If you go a little bit up and down, some of the values change. Its user interface should be improved. It should be like Tableau. Its performance is also slow and should be improved. I definitely feel some sort of speed issues with Power BI. The integration of Excel with Power BI would also be good."
What is our primary use case?
I am currently using it for my professional and training use. I am using the Power BI Premium per user recent scheme announced by Microsoft. In my current company, we are using Tableau.
What is most valuable?
I’m going to go cover my TOP 5 Features for getting you started on your own visualisations so you can be up and running and leveraging Power BI within your own business in no time at all. Power BI Desktop Sure you probably want to build some beautiful and interactive reports and dashboards to share all those insights from your data with your business, but perhaps lacking the experience that report designers, data queries specialists or Excel Power Users have? Well now all your end users can easily access data and build their own reports using a simple yet powerful interface, Power BI Desktop. Power BI Desktop is a free download which provides an excellent canvas for creating your own masterpiece’s or perhaps just a simple report or dashboard tile. Power BI Desktop with its monthly release cycle is constantly evolving with newly added features or enhancements that can ‘bring data alive’ often in just a few minutes or hours. Visibility Data is arguably one of most precious resource that businesses are generating today. The key aim to be able to manipulate and easily combine this valuable data with other datasets, and then have a simple way to gain a deeper understanding of their business. With data often residing across multiple systems and formats, a valuable resource that businesses need is to be able to collate the various datasets and generate different ways to visual and understand it. In order to identify trends and relationships which were not previously visible and help make those important DECISIONS that business need to make every day based on the right facts. With a deeper understanding that comes from interpreting data in a visual form, the data world has become even more important for a business to be able to leverage and gain the competitive edge it needs; so it’s no wonder that Microsoft’s BI can provide so much value with the data-shaping and modelling capabilities to unlock hidden insights. Custom Visualisations Every business has its own culture and way of doing things, sometimes the ‘standard way’ of doing something just doesn’t cut it and a need to customise it to make it work is needed. The same goes for visualisations that come as standard with Power BI tool, which for some may not provide the depth or complexity of visualisation that is needed in order to ‘bring data alive’. However by accessing the growing library of custom visualisations or even creating ones that meet a specific need is perhaps a way to find a competitive edge. Import Excel Data One of the recent improvements that was added was the ability to import data from Excel. It has a wizard for making it very straight forward so your Excel ‘Power User’s’ now have even greater functionality to make sense of the data. Power Q&A Have you wanted to be able to ask questions in your own language and have it answered? Now Power BI makes that very easy with the Dashboard Power Q&A and the underlying data models. You just start typing in your question and the data model provides the context and answer which can then be manipulated to suit your own visualisation needs.
What needs improvement?
Power BI is good with handling simple relationships between tables in a data model. But, if there are complex relationships between tables, that is, if they have more than one links between tables, Power BI might not handle them well. You need to create a data model carefully by having more unique fields so that Power BI does not confuse the relationships when it comes to complex relationships.
In most cases, you might not feel the need to configure and optimize visualizations in Power BI. But even if you do, Power BI does not provide many options to configure your visualizations as per your requirements. Thus, users have limited options for what they can change in visuals.
The user interface of Power BI is often found crowded and bulky by the users. It is in the sense that there are many icons of options that block the view of dashboard or report. Most users wish that the user interface or the report canvas was clearer with fewer icons and options. Also, creating scrolling dashboards is a native feature.
As we know, the expression language used to deal with data in Power BI is DAX. However, you can perform a lot of actions using the DAX formula in Power BI, it is still not the easiest language to work with. Sometimes the formulas you create work well in Power BI, sometimes they don’t. You can concatenate up to two elements but concatenating more than two elements needs nesting statements.
Power BI has a limit of ingesting data at a time which is approximately 2 GBs of data. If you wish to import and use data of even greater volumes, you need to extend your free version to a paid version of Power BI. Also, users have reported that Power BI takes a little more than usual time or even hangs while processing millions of rows and columns of data.
Usually, Power BI is the easiest to use BI tool if you are using it simply to import data and create reports. But Power BI is an entire suite having a lot of other interrelated tools. When the purpose of your use is more than just creating reports in Power BI Desktop, you need to learn and master several other tools like Gateways, Power BI Report Server, Power BI Services, etc.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using this solution for more than three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I am currently using it for my personal training, and I didn't find any stability issues, but when it comes to big data, there may be some sort of issues where the system might hang.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of adding more users, there shouldn't be any issues or limitations. Currently, I am using it for my personal use.
For very big companies with large-scale data and many rules, there would be speed issues with Power BI. Therefore, I don't recommend Power BI at this level. For such organizations, Tableau is the best solution. I have tried Tableau in many companies with many nodes, and I found no speed issues with Tableau. So, I won't recommend Power BI for organizations where 2,000 or 4,000 computers are connected, and there are multiple branches with data coming from different countries.
How are customer service and support?
I contacted them for an installation issue related to the RPA Power Automate Desktop. I had downloaded this software, and I was trying to use it with Office, but there were some installation issues. I contacted Microsoft's technical team, and they logged in to my computer and fixed the issue.
Their support is very nice. They called me and then remotely connected to my computer through Teams. They gave me very good support, and I am perfectly satisfied with them.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I can mentions main difference between Power BI and tableau which is as under. Advantages of Tableau Here, are pros/benefits of using Tableau BI: •Less cost of training •Very fast and easy to create visualizations •Good customer support •Data Interpreter Story-telling ability •Tableau offers a feature of visualization •It helps you to combine shape & clean the data for analysis. •It helps you to handle a large amount of data. •Uses scripting languages like R & Python to avoid performance for complex table calculations. •Allows users to create reports, dashboards, and stories using Tableau Desktop. Advantages of Power BI Here, are pros/benefits of Power BI •Offers pre-built dashboards and reports for SaaS Solutions •Provide real-time dashboard updates. •Secure and reliable connection to your data sources in the cloud or on-premises •Power BI offers quick deployment, hybrid configuration, and a secure environment. •Data exploration using natural language query. •Feature for dashboard visualization •New features frequently added that are great for excel users. •Extensive database connectivity capabilities Q&A feature publish to the web. •integration with both Python and R coding to use visualizations. •Power Query provides many options related to wrangling and clean the data. •Post publishing the data into Power BI web service can schedule refresh without manual intervention. •Power BI backed by the superpower of with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Disadvantages of Power BI Here, are cons/drawbacks of Power BI •Dashboards and reports only shared with users having the same email domains. •Power Bl will never mix imported data, which is accessed from real-time connections. •Power BI can't accept file size larger than 1 GB. •Dashboard never accept or pass user, account, or other entity parameters. Disadvantages of Tableau Here, are cons/drawbacks of Tableau •Relatively high cost •No change management or versioning •It is expensive, BI, when compared to other tools. •Importing custom visualization is a bit difficult. •Not offers easy methods for embedding reports to other applications. •Tableau is suitable only for a large organization which can pay for licensing cost. •The tableau does not offer support for artificial intelligence and machine learning. •There is integration with other Microsoft products like Power Apps , Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Microsoft Flow, which uses Single Sign-On (SSO).
How was the initial setup?
Its initial setup is very simple. There is no issue at all. If you have everything set up on your computer, it takes only 10 minutes.
In terms of maintenance, Power BI does not require any maintenance, but the database behind Power BI requires some sort of maintenance. Power BI is like a tap. It is just providing what is in the tank. For clean water, you just need to clean the tank at the back. To get good visualizations, you need to clean your database, tabling structure, and data modeling. If you are doing all data modeling in Power BI, then data modeling requires some sort of maintenance.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Power BI comes in three levels – Desktop, Pro, and Premium. The Desktop level is free for individual users. Pro – The Pro plan costs $9.99 per user, per month and includes a mobile app, the ability to publish and share reports, a 1 GB model size limit, eight data refreshes daily, the ability to connect to over 100 data sources, embedded APIs and controls, AI visuals, data security and encryption, metrics for content creation and publishing and up to 10 GB per user maximum storage. Pro is available for free for companies that have the Microsoft 365 E5 solution. Premium (per user) – Microsoft launched this new pricing strategy that costs $20 per user, per month. It includes all of the features of the Pro plan, plus paginated reports, a 100 GB model size limit, 48 data refreshes daily, advanced AI features, XMLA endpoint read/write connectivity, data flows, the ability to analyze data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage, application lifecycle management and up to 100 TB of maximum storage. Premium (per capacity) – This plan starts at $4,995 per month per dedicated cloud compute and storage resource. It includes all of the features of the Premium per user plan, plus on-premise reporting, a 400 GB model limit, multi-location deployment management, Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and autoscale add-on.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
No, I am diehard fan and accredited professional of Microsoft technologies, so I have no other thought.
What other advice do I have?
I will suggest below guidelines to Power BI users. Limit the number of visuals in dashboards and reports According to Microsoft's Optimization guide for Power BI, placing many visuals in a single report slows report performance. Limit widget visuals to eight per report page and grids to one per page. Limit pages 30 points (cards: 1, gauges: 2, charts: 3, maps: 3, grids: 5). Limit tiles to 10 per dashboard. To improve Power BI report performance, remove unnecessary interactions between visuals By default, all visuals on a report page can interact with one another. For optimal report performance, interactivity should be minimized. Reduce the number of queries fired at the back end and improve report performance by disabling unnecessary interactivity. Enable Row-Level Security (RLS) Row Level Security restricts user access to certain rows in a database depending on the characteristics (role) of the user executing a query. With RLS, Power BI only imports data the user is authorized to view. Combining Power BI roles with roles in the back end can result in substantial performance gains. Test all roles before rolling out to production. Use Microsoft AppSource certified custom visuals Power BI certified visuals are AppSource visuals that have passed rigorous quality testing. Microsoft verifies that certified custom visuals have robust, high-performance code. Certified custom visuals are the only custom visuals that can be viewed in Export to PowerPoint mode and email subscriptions. Use preview feature of hierarchy slicers instead of custom visual If you need to show hierarchy in slicers, enable the preview feature provided by the Power BI desktop instead of using of a custom visual. Provide data categorization for Power BI reports (HBI, MBI, LBI) High Business Impact (HBI) data requires users to get a policy exception to share the data externally. Low Business Impact (LBI) and Medium Business Impact (MBI) data do not require exceptions. By using Power BI data sensitivity labels, you raise user awareness about required security and how reports should be shared inside and outside the organization. Use on-premises data gateway instead of Personal Gateway Personal Gateway takes data and imports it into Power BI. Enterprise Gateway (on-premises data gateway) imports nothing, which is more efficient when working with large databases. Use different Power BI gateways for Live Connection and Scheduled Data Refresh If the same gateway is used for Scheduled Data Refresh and Live Connection, Live Connection performance will slow down when Scheduled Data Refresh is active. Avoid this issue by creating separate gateways for Live Connection and Scheduled Data Refresh. Test custom visual performance on reports to ensure fast report load time; use an alternative visual if the chosen visual performs poorly Uncertified custom visuals are generally not tested by the Power BI team. Custom visuals can perform poorly when handling large datasets or complex aggregations. If a custom visual performs poorly, consider replacing it with a different visual. Limit complicated complex measures and aggregations in data models Push calculated columns and measures to the source where possible. The closer they are to the source, the higher the likelihood of improved performance. Create calculated measures instead of calculated columns. Use star schema to design data models. Use slicers sparingly Slicers are a great way of allowing users to navigate data, but they come at a performance cost. Each slicer generates two queries: one gets the data, and the other fetches selection details. Creating too many slicers negatively impacts performance. To evaluate which slicers are infrequently used, use the Filter pane and remove unnecessary slicers. Ensure the Power BI report and data source are in the same region With the tenant and data source in the same region, you can reduce network latency. The results are faster data transfer and faster query execution. Import only necessary fields and tables instead of entire datasets Ensure the model is as narrow and lean as possible. Power BI works on columnar indexes; longer and leaner tables are preferred. Ensure the cache update frequency aligns with the data source refresh frequency Cache update frequency should be set at similar intervals to data source refresh frequency. By default, the Power BI cache update frequency is set to one hour. If, for example, your data set refreshes only once per day, you should update the cache frequency accordingly. Use white or light background colors For users distributing printed reports, white or light backgrounds are printer friendly. Shorten numbers Don’t exceed three or four numerals when displaying numbers. Display measures to one or two numerals left of the decimal point and scale for thousands or millions. Use Report Tooltip pages to provide more context for the highlighted measure Report tooltips are a great way of sharing additional information on the metric. Use limited visuals in Report Tooltip. Ensure you select Tooltip field carefully (categorical or measure). Use templates (.PBIT files) to speed up and standardize report development instead of starting with an empty .PBIX Templates can be saved with custom color palettes and themes pre-incorporated. Templates ensure corporate branding is pre-applied to all pages. Templates ensure connections to commonly used data sources are already in place. Templates create commonly used DAX measures. Source: LinkedIn Use names that are meaningful to your business users or intended audience Power BI provides the ability to give aliases to report objects. Avoid ambiguity when naming columns and measures. Consider hiding unused columns in the data model. Source: LinkedIn Reduce queries Reduce the number of queries sent by Power BI using the settings for Slicers and Filters.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Software Engineer at Ace Infoway Pvt. Ltd
Easy to use, but it needs to be made available to users for free
Pros and Cons
- "The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good."
- "From any improvement perspective, I want the product to be made available to users free of cost...The stability and scalability of the product can be better."
What is our primary use case?
I use the solution in my company for data analysis and visualization.
What is most valuable?
The advantages of Microsoft Power BI stem from the fact that it is really easy to use. The drag and drop facilities provided by the product are good.
What needs improvement?
I only face problems when I want the product for free to help prepare for some of the demos for my company.
From any improvement perspective, I want the product to be made available to users free of cost. The product should not require any subscriptions.
The stability and scalability of the product can be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Microsoft Power BI for six months. My company is a customer of the product.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.
How are customer service and support?
I don't have any experience with the solution's technical support. I rate the technical support a five out of ten.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
The product's initial setup phase was easy.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price.
What other advice do I have?
The product improved my company's decision-making project when I was involved in a project where I had to do an analysis involving LinkedIn and other social media accounts.
The product's maintenance phase is easy.
My company can share and manage Microsoft Power BI across different teams in the company since we have only opted for the subscription for a single person. In my company, we do exchange web URLs, and it helps us exchange reports with different teams.
My experience with the real-time dashboard updates of the product has been good.
I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide
Download our free Microsoft Power BI Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: September 2025
Popular Comparisons
Tableau Enterprise
Teradata
IBM Cognos
Amazon QuickSight
SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
Oracle OBIEE
MicroStrategy
Oracle Analytics Cloud
QlikView
TIBCO Spotfire
ThoughtSpot
Looker Studio
Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Microsoft Power BI Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More: Questions:
- BI Reports for business users - which BI solutions should we choose?
- Business users moving from Tableau to MS Report builder
- Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
- What are the key advantages of OBIEE compared to Microsoft BI?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between Microsoft BI and Oracle OBIEE?
- Is Microsoft Power BI good for an ETL process?
- How would you decide between Microsoft Power BI and TIBCO Spotfire?
- Is it easy to extract data from Oracle Fusion into Power BI?
- PowerBI or SyncFusion - which is better?
- What challenges to expect when migrating multiple dashboards from TIBCO Spotfire to Microsoft Power BI?
Pra mim, deve ser ultilizado com recursos um pouco mais simples para atender outros publicos, facilitando os usuarios a terem conhecimento sobre a plataforma.