Microsoft Power BI Reviews

We use Microsoft Power BI for production testing. We're not using it for production automation. It's being used for testing and testing themes. We have a testing requirement, so we want to mimic automated workflows on production to be validated on regular intervals, and this is how we use this solution.

One valuable feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's user-friendly. It also has good connectivity between multiple source systems. It's also a good data analysis tool.

The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. This is what Microsoft can work on. They should make the graphs more user-friendly, because other parts of Microsoft Power BI are user-friendly, but the graphical representations aren't.

We've been dealing with Microsoft Power BI for five to ten years now. We were early adopters of cloud solutions, e.g. AWS and Azure, which we adopted from the start. We are a complete cloud company.

Microsoft Power BI is a stable solution.

I find Microsoft Power BI scalable.

It's very easy to deploy Microsoft Power BI.

Microsoft Power BI has reasonable pricing.

We evaluated Microsoft Azure.

We use Microsoft Power BI. We also use AWS, but what we primarily use is Microsoft Power BI.

We're using a combination of deployment models for this solution, because the model will depend on the customer need.

We don't procure this solution and other Microsoft tools for ourselves. It's the customer who procures them, and there is not much issues for us to contact support. We are a Microsoft company, e.g. we are partners with Microsoft, so we have good rapport with them.

We recommend Microsoft Power BI even for large enterprises. It's a tool that could be used even by smaller enterprises and by end customers.

My rating for Microsoft Power BI is an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for data analytics, so we use it to manage data governance, manage the data for certain organizations, and present it in a way that is more advanced than the manual reporting that was being done before via Excel. Now it's kind of interactive. It's more modern, so there are a lot of new features. It can be integrated with more BI tools also.

I've been in different organizations with different setups. I've experienced using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid.

Considering that it's Microsoft, it can be integrated with the Power Platform, which is also Microsoft-based, like SharePoint, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, which is the most user-friendly. It can also be integrated with more systems or domains that are non-Power BI domains, so it can be connected using API, SQL, or Azure. You can connect into your local premises, or database, et cetera. There's a lot that you can use Power BI with, and I think it's the number one BI platform in the market.

Based on my experience, everything's good in Power BI. Consistently, it's being updated every month. There's a new feature that is being added to the platform, but I think one thing that can be improved is with regard to the error messages. When there is a problem, the error message is not specific about what's causing the problem. Maybe they intentionally generalize it because there could be a lot of causes. From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT.

There needs to be more specific error messages. You encounter problems normally for the development part and maintainability part, and there are some issues that you or any developers would encounter. It's resolvable, but it would take some effort to really dig in and investigate. Some of the messages, for example, will say that the main package is missing, which could mean a lot of things. It could be a formatting error, it could be a file type error, it could be a transformation error on the helper file, et cetera. If there was a sub-description of what that is, it would be a great improvement on Power BI.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is very stable. It's been around for more than five years. It was released to the market around 2015, it was conceptualized in 2011, and consistently it's been at the top of the market, against all its competitors, because it's a Microsoft product. I think the secret there is in the way they update their report consistently. The platform is being updated every month, so all the needs of the developers are being met.

It's scalable. You can be a junior developer and work on your mini projects or your supporting mini team, and you can create your own presentation with Power BI, as simple as that. You can also handle multi-database projects and huge enterprise level data and combine all the different systems, get all the data, and put it into Power BI. Power BI has the capability and the power to cater that.

There are times when I can't resolve certain problems, and of course I'll exhaust all my resources. I would talk to my colleagues as well. Aside from that, there are BI groups or BI developer groups on Facebook, wherein I just post a question and then we all help each other. But if there are problems that can't be resolved, we go to Microsoft and create a ticket.

You don't need any technical support for BI because you have a very big community. There's Google, and then there are a lot of people who are very willing to help.  Adam, from Guy in a Cube, is very popular. He's part of Microsoft, and he's popular on YouTube. He answered one of my questions, and it's a very hard question. I think a lot of the problems that I encountered were resolved.

I have also used Active Directory. I was a service desk analyst, which is a level one IT. For Active Directory, I use that to support the organization's directory, IT concerns like internet error issues, their profile, if they can't access a certain website, their password needs to be reset, et cetera. 

Power BI has different kinds of setups, so one setup would be connecting to an SQL server database. I have experience connecting to SQL databases, and I do basic SQL coordinates because normally it's done in collaboration with SQL administrators.

I'm a seasoned BI developer, so it's easy for me, especially if it's not a very complicated project. There are different setups, depending on the project and depending on the organization. There are really complicated ones. For example, if you are going to connect to SSA live connection, a cube has to be built, there will be expenses, et cetera. There are requirements that would involve different teams and different people because of the expenses, et cetera. There are also simple ones like when you're just connecting to Big Data, or SharePoint, or SAPI, or local, or databases. It depends on projects, but for me as a seasoned developer, I think it's going to be easy.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10, against all the other competitors and as a BI tool.

It's a 10 because of the price. It's not that expensive compared to other BI tools. It's also with regard to maintainability. It's easier to understand, easy to manage, and it's very flexible. You can create projects, you can create a website, et cetera. It also has accessibility. It can be integrated with a lot of systems and applications. It's the leading BI tool in the market.

We deal with government agencies that compile stats and data. For instance, the use cases for the department of education are all school-related. They need to know the number of schools in a given region, attendance, etc. They also need to monitor monthly changes in the data, so they run analytics to see where enrollment and attendance are dropping or how schools are performing. 

Recently, we developed an application for the South African statistical bureau. They use Power BI for their dashboards to show precisely how many people were counted in which areas, and where they have the challenges. We have different use cases depending on the project and the client's requirements.

It's deployed in the cloud because Microsoft has switched to offering Power BI as a service. Most of our clients are doing all of their business intelligence primarily on the cloud, but we still have clients that are running SQL who prefer to do their own intelligence internally instead of using cloud solutions.

The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics. 

There are probably several other useful intelligent tools included with Power BI that we never use, but they might be good for other use cases. For instance, if you're selling consumer products, you might benefit from Power BI's ability to track sales performance. But our government customers mostly use data visualization internally to make decisions. 

I'm not a heavy Power Bi user. I use it as my CRM, and it gives me all the information that I need. I haven't found anything that isn't useful for what I'm working on at the moment. Maybe later, I might think of something and find that Power BI doesn't have. It's quite an improvement compared to using Microsoft SQL for business intelligence. 

We've been working with Power BI for many years. Before we started using Power BI, we were on SQL SSIS and SSRS. We've been in the BI business launched back in 2003. Most of our business was business intelligence even though we didn't have a lot of analytics. 

We do quite a lot of data warehousing, business intelligence, etc., but when we started, we were mainly dealing with data manipulation. I would say it has been more than 15 years.

I don't have any complaints because we used to be a partner of a company that set up our environment. They are a sales partner, and our sales are very good, but there were always issues with the technical support. At the moment, I would still recommend everyone to move to Microsoft Power BI regardless of their environment.

It's highly scalable and stable. 

One of the vendors we used to work with was Qlik, but we found that Qlik's support wasn't as good as what we're getting from Microsoft. With IBM, the biggest challenge was that companies didn't have the analytics skills to use their solution. Customers would complain that it didn't do what they wanted it to do, but it is not the tool. It's the skill that you have on the market. 

Microsoft made sure they certified competent solution implementers. It was great. We were privileged to be one of those companies that Microsoft picked, and they helped us train some of our technicians to be adept at some of these solutions.

All of our technicians are certified, so Microsoft refers certain organizations to us locally for help implementing their solutions. We have a solid technical team, especially around the Microsoft Power Apps, including Power BI.

Deploying Power BI is straightforward because they've made it so easy with cloud solutions when they came out with the Microsoft Power Apps. Power Apps includes Power BI, Microsoft Flow, and some others. I do everything myself, so I can do my workflows in the background of Power BI on all the applications even though I'm not an everyday applications development person. I haven't done development in years.

With Power Apps, you don't necessarily need to install anything because it's already there on the cloud. You customize it and point it to your data sources. Within a couple of minutes, you're done. Then from there on, you can customize your reports however you want. I think it's effortless to work with.

The number of people needed for deployment depends on the size of the organization, and the scope of what you're trying to do. You may have a small organization with fewer than 500 people, but they might deal with a lot of data. That means the project is going to be very big. 

Conversely, you could have an organization with about 2,000 people, but they are not a data-intensive organization. Then you will need just a few people. For much larger organizations, you'll find that you might need to have the whole applications development team of between five to 10 people for the actual implementation, including your project manager, business analysts, and various technical support personnel.  

For a big organization, you would maybe have five technical guys, including your lead as well as two senior technical people and two juniors. Then as the project grows, you can add four more. At the end of the day, we're looking at about five to 10 people for a bigger project.

However, it's not the same as an on-prem deployment. Most of the work is customization because everything else has been done on Azure. Generally, with things like your standard Power BI deployment, you need just about five people. That includes the project manager and the business analysts plus two or three technical people. 

You do an installation and all the customization a client wants, but from there on, you run out of work to do because everything is running smoothly. I've heard some say that it's making people lazy because if you do everything correctly the first time around, you won't have anything to do for a couple of months except maybe change a couple of things for users. From the technical point of view, you find that you have absolutely no work to do until you move on to the next client. The deployment is quick versus how long it used to take as before we went on to Azure.

You don't need a large team for maintenance because somebody else takes care of it. At most, you need two or three technical people and then an account manager. Probably about three. You're not managing the service or the infrastructure. You are just managing the environment.

The management is much easier compared to how we used to do it before. You needed maybe six or seven people, with some managing the environment and others the infrastructure. For example, the department of education has a user base of more than 500,000 people, but the whole environment is managed by two people. With the Azure infrastructure, everything running in the background is taken care of. 

The return on investment with Microsoft is quite good. The value of the product is far higher than the price you pay. The most significant added value with Microsoft products is their ease of use. If you buy things like Power BI, you become a Microsoft partner and gain access to some customer training, so you learn to optimize everything related to Power BI.

They go the extra mile. They have the training online, so when you get stuck, you can go through the training and know exactly where you made a mistake instead of going out to a training institution and spending a lot of money for precisely the same training. The licenses you pay over five years don't even make a dent in some companies' budgets.

For instance, one of our customers was running a Software AG solution analytics solution. Even though we are a Software AG partner, we suggested they go with a different solution because of their budget. We implemented Power BI, and now they don't want to go back to the previous product because they're saying this one is much more user-friendly than before.

Most of the customers we work with go for volume licenses. Some pay annually or get a more extended license for three to five years. All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years.

I think that's helpful because most government institutions budget on a five-year basis. They have a five-year plan broken down into an annual OPEX. The CAPEX will be five years, and everything else would be OPEX. Most of these licenses get put on an OPEX whereby the client pays once. Then for the five years, they don't necessarily have to worry about anything with Microsoft.

These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid. I guess that is a risk you take in business.

I would rate Microsoft BI nine out of 10. We buy from a couple of vendors, and Microsoft is always at the top of the list for ease of use, simplicity, and cost. I've used the other vendors, but I'm still in love with Microsoft.

We have both deployments for Microsoft BI, cloud, and the on-premise.

We are using SAP BI and Microsoft BI to augment the other.

Overall Microsoft BI is meeting our needs.

In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility.

When you create tables in Microsoft BI, you have to create them separately. I can't have several reports packed together in one document, whereby I can have different tabs. You could have several pages of your dashboard, such as a summary page with all the detail. However, in the paginated reports, you don't have that kind of flexibility. This is a major area that Microsoft needs to work on.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately three years.

Microsoft BI is stable.

I have found Microsoft BI to be scalable. We did an enterprise-wide deployment and every one of the 500 people in the company uses it.

I have not needed to contact Microsoft or the local vendor.

We use SAP BI in parallel to Microsoft BI currently. Our plan is to replace the SAP BI with Power BI. The phase we are in now is to run both of them in parallel and see how everything is operating before we completely phase out SAP BI. The focus isn't on SAP or Power BI. It used to be our SAP BI solution. Since we started using Power BI, the plan is to actually discontinue SAP BI. maybe by next year we will no longer use the SAP BI.

I switched to Microsoft BI from SAP BI because, in my part of the world, it is becoming the most popular BI tool. Additionally, the ease of integration and our organization is a Microsoft shop. Everything is Microsoft, our databases, our ERP, and we use Microsoft dynamics and Business Center. 

The ease of integration of the BI tool is important for our organization. The scalability and then the licensing are good. If you choose the cloud for SAP BI, you have to spend more. The planning modules sometimes do not come with the package and you will need to spend on it.

It is not necessarily that Microsoft BI is better, but because there are other benefits when you consider Microsoft BI. The ease of integration with the DB and the ERP, and then you look at the overall cost.

The initial setup is simple to do.

We did the implementation ourselves. The solution does require maintenance.

The price of Microsoft BI is reasonable. Other solutions such as SAP Cloud are more expensive.

We pay annually for the license of the solution and we are using a premium license.

The choice of a BI tool is relative. If you have the capacity and the budget, you could decide to use SAP BI. There are other BI tools on the market. Why did we choose Microsoft BI is because of the nature of our business environment, the nature of your data, and many other factors that have to be considered.

I rate Microsoft BI a seven out of then.

We're using it for sales information and production information. Pushing a report into Power BI makes it easier to use and a little bit more powerful.

We're using the most recent version of the solution.

The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it.

We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses.

We've had Microsoft BI for about two years, and we are using it currently. It's a part of Microsoft Teams.

It's stable. 

I don't know if it's scalable to the point that we want it. It seems to fit where we have it. We haven't really looked at its scalability. We have other tools, but it works well for what it's doing today.

There are roughly half a dozen users of this solution, and it has sales-related information. There is one driver, and she merges the information. So, there aren't too many rules at this point.

We don't have any plans to increase its usage at this time.

It has been good.

That would've been Excel. So, it isn't a switch; it is growth.

It was easy. We had a good understanding of being able to map two programs together. We had a little training, but otherwise, it was good.

The program installation took a few days, but it took weeks to make the intelligence and the company information look right.

We did it ourselves. We had an individual who worked with it in the past. She picked it up very quickly because she was already trained.

We don't need anybody specific for its maintenance.

We didn't evaluate any other options. The use of Power BI just came with the program, and we installed it. We weren't looking for something different. It just was there for us to use.

My advice to others who are looking into implementing this product is that it is important that they understand their information. They have to understand how the program works, but they also have to understand their information for it to work better.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We use Microsoft BI to fetch data from one server in SSMS to another server.

I find many of the features of Microsoft BI valuable, in particular, I use the data flow tasks, look up and incremental loading of data. They have also introduced Hadoop in the control flow task.

I have created particular dashboards for a specific project so that I can show the clients the data related to their needs. Being able to show them a visual of the percentages in a pie chart has been very effective.

The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it.

In my last project, I worked with SSMS as my source and Oracle as my destination. This meant that there were certain compatibility issues between the two. I recommend for incremental load that Microsoft BI can include one task to overcome this concern.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for six years.

Most of my experience was with MS BI, with Power BI the difference is mainly in the report sections. It is more user-friendly compared to SSRS.

If you are not comfortable with SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS, there are many tutorials available for MS BI, especially if you are new to the solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an 8 out of 10.

We are impressed with Microsoft Power BI. The tools seem very easy to use and very interactive. People love to see us reinforcing it, especially the top management. They're okay with that. We are exploring Supersets. 

It's user-friendly.

The most important thing is the developing version is free. Only the online version you have to purchase. That is one of the key advantages we are getting. We can reduce the internal costs that way. 

It can take in all kinds of data to analyze. 

It's very comparable to other solutions on the market.

The initial setup is relatively simple. 

Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse. Those are the data sources I didn't find in Power BI. Those data sources cannot be connected to Power BI. You need third-party support for that. This is the one key problem I have with Power BI right now.

We have various departments in our company. While some departments have used it for maybe two years, my particular department has only used it for about a year. 

This is a stable product. I found, once, in the middle of the work, it shut down or something. However, it is stable. When I put some of the reports in the Power BI cloud version, everything worked fine. I was able to get the report data. 

As long as I can scale my data, I can scale the product. I just put my data into Power BI and do what I need to do. 

The data solution we have is open source. The whole team is working on it, and that's a team of 15 people. The number of people that are actively writing and reporting is maybe six or seven people. Maybe two or three people seeing are seeing report deposits and getting the outcomes. 

We don't have any technical contract with anyone, whatever the problem comes up, we can solve it ourselves. In my country, I personally don't know anyone who is actually, is smart enough to show us anything extra that we don't already know.

We are exploring Power BI, Microsoft Synapse Analytics, and some BI features on Azure. 

We previously used Oracle BI. It's a good tool. Oracle BI is more for the enterprise, big enterprise, for big control of data security and can get into how you control your people, who can see what, et cetera. The downside is, it is very old. You will not get the very latest tools or visuals in Oracle BI. That, we can easily find in Power BI.

The implementation process is relatively easy. One the junior developer can learn the process in maybe one or two days. He can catch up on Power BI and how it works. It is straightforward, I would say.

We do have a license for the product. 

We purchased a few licenses for the top bosses who want to see the reports on the run, on their own PC, laptop, or mobile. We purchased a few licenses for the developers as well. other than that, no need to purchase a license.

We have both on-premises and cloud versions. The advanced team who has actually been using it for around two years have an online version. They're putting the data online and showing it. I cannot say exactly what they do. However, on our side, we do not use an online version. We have the three versions that we are using now that are on-prem. 

Overall, it's a good solution. However, there are a lot of other really great similar solutions you can use as well.

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

The main use cases that we see for Power BI are financial reporting, network analysis, structured and unstructured reporting, and self-service. We have just recently completed a pilot phase of Power BI and Qlik Sense, evaluating them against each other. In this pilot, we have had about 50 users in our company use Power BI, but eventually we envision having up to 300 concurrent users.

There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources.

There's also support for integration of Microsoft 365, which enhances collaboration with all these interwoven tools including email, Teams, SharePoint, and so on.

My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack.

Along with that, whenever you encounter an issue and you need to do some troubleshooting, it is really hard to isolate the problem. For example, is it related to your data? Is it related to your report design or your construct? Or is it related to the visuals? Power BI is really not that helpful when it comes to troubleshooting.

My suggestion is that there should be some kind of design validator that says, "Hey, warning! This report (or this set of queries) cannot run fast." There may be a long list of restrictions you need to take into account when it comes to optimization.

I have been using Power BI for nine months now.

It's not exactly as stable as I would like. We have had several service reliability issues as well as service degradation issues, which of course are typical to a sales based context. During those moments, though, it has been pretty inconvenient, especially for the users. Luckily we have not been confronted with that situation in production yet, as it was a non-production pilot setup.

It's not easily scalable for us, in the way that we consider scalability. You have to be careful when considering an upgrade to your capacity plan, which comes with an extra cost. Alternatively, you need to simplify the reports that you have designed with your plan and eventually remodel them to accommodate further usage without unnecessary cost.

Even then, you are confronted with various product limitations or scalability constraints. For example, there is a maximum amount of queries that you can launch simultaneously. Ultimately, you need to remain cautious because it's not a one-size-fits-all approach especially when it comes to the price.

I've used the Power BI support from various locations multiple times and I am satisfied with the help I received.

The current deployment we have relies on SAP BO (Business Objects) which is a vintage version and an aging solution, over approximately 10 years old now. SAP does have a more innovative replacement product, of course, namely SAP Analytics Cloud, or SAC.

We discussed our needs, requirements, report layouts, and so on with SAP and following further deeper analysis, SAP came back and confirmed that they could not realize it in the short term using SAP Analytics Cloud. It would require much more effort, including the integration of a data warehouse and more to reach our goals. And hence, as per SAP's recommendation, we dropped that scenario from our considerations.

It's a sales-based offering so, by nature, it is simple and straightforward. However, the integration options are quite fuzzy and relatively complex when you start to connect to the variety of data sources.

It took a relatively long time of about three months to get everything up and running. The setup took longer than expected, to be honest, but the reason is not only related to the product as such. It was also related to the existing knowledge and capabilities of the IT delivery provider, where multiple gaps were identified.

I designed the implementation of Power BI myself as the enterprise architect. I've been supervising the entire deployment and together with Microsoft product support, we've encountered various issues and discussed various situations on how to manage Power BI.

An example of the trouble we faced was that there were various middleware components that we needed to deploy as well. They were deployed but they were not up to the standards that I had identified. We had to upgrade and then patch them up to avoid that happening again.

As of today, we have a team of eight staff, including managers, engineers, and administrators, who handle deployments and maintenance.

Our license is paid yearly and we have found that we have to be careful not to over-extend our usage in order to avoid upgrading our capacity plan.

Whether I can recommend Power BI depends on what you are searching for with this type of tool. It is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

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