Microsoft Power BI Reviews

I primarily use the solution for the reports. We use it a lot for self-reporting.

We're making a dashboard that can show specific details and can be easily customized. It's very useful for creating dashboards.

The reporting is good.

The solution is stable. 

We can scale it if we need to.

It's a very easy-to-use solution. The product is quite user-friendly.

The initial installation is difficult. 

The pricing is a bit high and we'd like it to be less expensive.

I've used the solution for two years now.

The product is stable. Its performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability is good. If a company wants to, it can expand.

We have about 15 to 20 people that use the solution.

We're not sure if we will expand usage in the future or not. That's still to be decided.

We manage technical support ourselves. We do not need to reach out to Microsoft for help. Therefore, I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they would be.

I found the initial setup to be difficult. It's not exactly straightforward. The deployment might take about an hour.

We use three people for deployment and maintenance tasks. 

We have to pay for licensing. I've paid for a license in the past.

We'd like for it to be a little less expensive.

I would recommend the solution to others based on its ease of use.

I mostly work in the oil and gas industry. Microsoft BI is primarily associated with surveillance, optimization, product, and forecasting-related items. While I am not currently using Microsoft BI, I have prior experience, and in my current position, I am guiding the team on a larger scale. I don't use it myself frequently, but I am the lead for that team, and when I do use it, I use it for reporting purposes.

Microsoft BI has a multitude of additional features. Overall it's an EDA tool, from which you can extract, transform, and load data. You can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources.

When I compare other analytical tools to Microsoft BI, I believe Microsoft BI is far more accurate, and the frequency is also better.

It has additional features, which are very much useful. The most important thing I like is that it is just a data platform connecting to the overall process and it can be utilized in any sector.

Integrating it with the physics build model or the engineering model should be included. When we use engineering models linked to Microsoft BI or Salesforce, the engineering models are from a third-party application.

I have been working with Microsoft BI for the last three and a half years.

We are using the latest update.

I have used it both on-premises and on the cloud.

In terms of stability, I have seen some cases where it is difficult as well as some cases where it is very easy. Overall, it is a stable and reliable product.

It is easy to scale Microsoft BI.

We have a larger team. Microsoft BI specifically, is not limited to any subset or any team. I believe we have 1,000 plus users in my company currently who are using this application.

I have been in touch with the technical team, but not specifically for Microsoft BI. Based on my experience with Microsft technical support, I would rate them a four out of five.

Technical support is pretty decent.

I use a variety of tools, including Salesforce, and I have developed a number of Python-based tools.

The initial setup was simple. However, when I did it the first time, it was complex. Once I understood the process it was simple.

My field was small due to the type of setup required. I scheduled it for one week, during which we also tested.

Definitely, it requires maintenance in terms of quality checking of the data, as well as whether or not the run times or schedules are working properly.

I had some assistance when I deployed the first time, but I am now able to complete the deployment on my own.

In terms of licensing, I've never worked on the contractual side of their license. However, I believe that the number of licenses currently in use is appropriate for our organization. It also adds value to the team. I have never worked on licensing, but I have heard that it is reasonable.

I have not used it on the mobile app. I'm not sure how Microsoft BI works on a mobile app. 

Mobile apps are sometimes third-party apps that are difficult to configure and use. As a result, mobile apps are something that will be required in the future, upcoming data transformation.

Before implementing Microsoft BI or any other analytical tool, we must first understand the domain. Basically, how the data is linked, what data you want to transform, and what output you need for the finished product. Then you proceed with your deployment in a sequential manner. It will be very simple.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten. I haven't explored many other items that are feasible or possible, or the analytical part of Microsoft BI's functionality, which I haven't personally used, so there's a gap. Otherwise, I would have given it a ten.

For the most part, clients require dashboards. We are developing quite a few dashboards for them.

The solution has improved a lot within the organization. We can view chunks of data and detailed data at various levels. 

When we have done training in the cloud previously, I have a long experience in BI tools. I've worked on Cognos BI, Informatica, and other tools including QlikView. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

There are some great automation elements in the product.

It's a good tool and designing dashboards is easy.

In SAP, we have a suite of components here in a single module. This includes forecasting and budgeting. There's also a smart answers section. Whenever we design any chart or something, the tool provides some information regarding that data. That would be quite a good feature that could be included in future versions of Microsoft BI.

The licensing could be a bit better.

You do need to do some hard coding for certain things in Microsoft BI.

I've used the solution for about one year.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. I haven't had issues with it crashing or freezing.

The scalability is great. If you need to expand the product, you can do so. You can easily add more users. 

I'm not sure how many users are using the product. 

Technical support is great. I've worked with them before and have been happy with their level of service. 

I've previously used Cognos BI. I've also had the opportunity to work with SAP.

I haven't got any opportunity to install any Power BI system. That said, for tutorial purposes, I have installed the desktop version in my system. It was very smooth.

It took 30 to 40 minutes for me to install the desktop version. During my learning phase, I prepared one dashboard. Similar to when I worked on Cognos BI, there were some features that we have to hard code and incorporate manually. There is some automation in Power BI. For example, if we are designing some interactive things we have to write code possibly. Still, even having to write code, in Power BI, was a very smooth experience.

We have people on our team that can handle maintenance tasks. 

We had a team of five to six people that handled the implementation in-house.

The client is continuing to use it, likely due to the fact that they see some sort of ROI. However, I don't have exact metrics. 

I'd prefer if the licensing was a bit better.

The customers need to pay the licensing fee. I can't speak to the exact pricing for their contract.

Typically, the solution architect is the one who decides which tool to use. However, we also were there and had a brainstorming session before choosing the tools. We did look at open-source options. At the time I prepared one checklist comparison between all the tools available in the market. Those included SAP, QlikView, and Tableau.

We are an integrator and a partner. We are providing support activities to one of our clients.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We have many use cases, from creating full ETL workloads for supporting some dashboards to only building dashboards by themselves. For example, there is one stage where we had to do some data integration from several sources to assess the quality of the data that we are consuming for our projects. We had to ingest data and convert it using Power BI, which is useful but isn't the best ETL tool, and I understand that that is not its purpose. Finally, we built out a schema model and built reports upon that. It's a full project. 

We also have another project, where we are attempting to do some incremental refresh because we are ingesting a lot of data from lake sources and SQL sources. We are doing direct query and applying some optimization from Synapse.

I am currently using the latest version of Power BI.

The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything.

Something that everyone has suggested and that we are currently implementing and testing is the ability to export tables with the same format. That is something many customers were seeking, and right now it is possible to do that. Focusing on table support is a huge opportunity.

One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies.

When you try to process a lot of data from one million records, it breaks. The computer runs out of CPU and memory. It's terrible, but I know it's not its main purpose, so that would be my suggestion.

It's stable, but the desktop is not so stable. I have experienced several crashes. I would say there is a lot of opportunity for improvement on that.

A couple of people are needed for deployment and maintenance. You always need a developer who is proficient on Power Query and maybe some other DevOps guy who sets up the pipeline. So, maybe two people at most. It's very easy.

Scalability on the ETL side is not so good. When you run the workloads on service, you can fail almost anything, but it's not exactly the best for scaling.

On the virtualization side, I would say it's good.

I haven't actually needed much technical support. I know there are forums and people respond, but I haven't really sought that out. There is so much documentation online, there are books online, and there are YouTube channels from guys that provide solutions to issues and to some other stuff. The community is very proficient.

It is very easy. Even non-IT professionals use it and deliver value to the company.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is to just jump right into it, download the Power BI desktop and start looking at YouTube channels. There are lots of people who have made wonderful things on YouTube.

I'm a call center consultant and I use Microsoft BI to receive in-depth metrics. I download the metrics from the contact center and then I can figure out what's going on in the contact center. Additionally, if we integrate it with other tools and databases, et cetera, we can receive a better understanding of what is happening. For example, we had a customer that made products for Costco and Walmart and if they had an engineering issue or a problem, they don't find out about it until they saw the orders from the engineering team explaining what the issue was.

We added a screen to the agent's desktop and listed the model numbers of the products and then used Microsoft BI analytics to see what particular problem happened to what product. The executive could drill down and hear the calls as to what the customer was saying about the issue.

The executives liked the data, the engineers liked hearing what the customers were saying about the certain product that had an issue.

Microsoft BI is easy to use and to design. I found Microsoft BI a lot easier than Tableau.

You can set Microsoft BI up for administration to use it and then you can set up views for your end-users to look at. For example, if you are a report analyst you could have your marketing person wants Microsoft BI to report on how many widgets the East Coast sold in five years, if you set Microsoft BI up the right way, they can retrieve that information themselves. You save manpower from your IT staff.

Microsoft BI is a lot easier to analyze data than with other solutions, such as Excel.

I am taking a course to be able to use the solution better. Some aspects of the solution are not straightforward.

I have been using Microsoft BI for approximately one year.

I have found Microsoft BI is stable. 

I have not had any issues. I am a new user myself, and I typically suggest an application that I have found good and then somebody else that I work with, would set it up.

The solution has been scalable for what I use it for.

I have not used technical support.

I have used Tableau.

The initial setup is very easy because it is on the cloud. You only need to have your database and connect it to Microsoft BI. They have different connectors in order to make it easy to do.

I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution.

The solution has all the features I need, I do not use large data sets.

I rate Microsoft BI a ten out of ten.

We use it for data visualization.

It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc.

There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you.

It is absolutely stable.

It is absolutely scalable. You can scale it a lot.

It has been straightforward and easy. 

In terms of maintenance, for the most part, it is fairly low-maintenance. Once you have it set, it is fire-and-forget. The users want to see the view and the information, and there is nothing more to do other than just let it be.

I would give it an eight out of 10. It is a pretty powerful tool.

We are Microsoft resellers.

We use it for clients to extract and analyze data from ERP systems. Then, we basically put it in on-premise Power BI, and once we have the reports and visuals that we want, we publish it to different members of whoever has access to see the reports. Basically, we publish it to their Power BI in the Cloud.

For one client, it gives all sales reps across all geographic regions access to sales data, so they know who's purchasing what product in what part of the country, and that sort of thing. It shows them overtime when sales are high and low, as well as what types of customers are buying. We occasionally connect it to external data. We link it to some demographic data, such as population figures in different provinces in Canada, to see how sales are doing.

It is beneficial. It's one of the applications we use for a client's sales reps all over the country to get all kinds of sales data. It also benefits them. They can ask, "Why isn't this customer purchasing this specific product?" So they know which customers are genuine or who are purchasing and may try to push a different line with them. It provides a wealth of useful information to the salespeople.

It gives us, the ability to do a lot of analysis quickly, similar to ad hoc analysis. People want to know, for example, which customers are purchasing which products over what time period. It's very simple to make visuals for them. We create a matrix that resembles a spreadsheet and then link it to various graphic visuals, pie charts, and other types of charts. They also get a visual sense of what's going on. Those features are fantastic.

One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel. It is getting better. It's better than it was six, eight, or nine months ago, but it's still not quite there. They could probably improve that a little bit. 

The only disadvantage of how we're using it is that it can be difficult to get the data into Excel at times. A lot of users are very familiar with Excel, so having a seamless interface into Excel would be a big plus for a lot of people, in my opinion. Otherwise, it's an excellent product.

I have been selling Microsoft BI for two years.

I am using the most recent version.

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

For us, the stability has been great. We have no issues with the stability of Microsoft BI.

I believe it is a scalable product. I'm aware that they have other products on the market, but I haven't tried them. To analyze data, it appears to be scalable to fairly large businesses. Scalability is quite good.

It is not a single organization. It's amongst a few clients of mine. I would estimate the number of users to be about 20, 25, or something along those lines. Their roles vary a lot. Several users are salespeople and people in purchasing. There are also people in management who use it and people in the accounting area as well. There are also one or two more technical users who use it to export data to Excel PivotTables. These are the people who make use of it.

For one client, it's very extensively used. Others, I wouldn't say that it is used as extensively. They could use it a lot more.

I have not had any interaction with technical support.

Before using Power BI, we used a lot of Excel, Power Pivot, and other similar tools. We transitioned a lot of our data models from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI, including the PivotTables. It was a Microsoft solution. It was Excel, from Excel and Power Pivot to Power BI.

The initial setup went quite well. It was a fairly straightforward process. There were no major hiccups.

It took approximately four to five hours to configure.

I have one client who has an administrator who updates the system. He updates the product and his data on a regular basis. I believe the data must be updated once a month. Other clients' updates are handled by me.

We did not need assistance, we completed it in-house.

Yes, I believe so. I haven't actually measured it, but based on one particular client, I believe their company is expanding at a rapid pace. I believe a large portion of it is or a good deal of it is based on the information they receive. I believe there will be a return.

It's straightforward licensing. I would guess we pay $300 to $400 per month for everyone or something along those lines.

Depending on where they're coming from, one thing is that if you want to get deeply involved in it, you have to learn the programming language, which I believe is DAX. It is not difficult to become involved in and learn. Microsoft, in my opinion, has done a good job of making it simple. That's one area I believe people should look into if they want to learn more than just the fundamentals of the DAX programming language. Which we have done in part. Again, we are not experts, but we have looked into it.

I would rate Microsoft BI a nine out of ten. It does almost everything we require.

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.