Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$9.99
per user/per month
Zoho Analytics
Score 8.1 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) is a self-service BI and analytics platform that allows users to analyze their business data and create reports and dashboards. It is designed to help users create and share reports quickly, without IT assistance.
$50
per month
Pricing
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Zoho Analytics
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$9.99
per user/per month
Power BI Premium
4,995
per month
Basic
$30
0.5M rows, 2 users
Professional
$30
per user per month billed annually
Standard
$60
1M rows, 5 users
Premium
$145
5M rows, 15 users
Enterprise
$575
50M rows, 50 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Zoho Analytics
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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There is a 20% discount for all plans if subscribed yearly. Customers can buy add-on rows and users, in addition to the plans listed above.
Specific data displays are some of the strongest aspects of Microsoft BI when compared to alternate programs. It also does a superior job in compatibility with many programs, especially those from Microsoft. Since my company primarily uses Office 365 and other Microsoft …
The integration functionality was so much slicker with Zoho Analytics. They've made it easy to reach out to 3rd party apps as well as other Zoho apps to bring the data all into one place.
Verified User
Director
Chose Zoho Analytics
I looked at MS Power BI, Tableau, and Google Data Studio. I am also a user of other reporting and analytic tools, primarily Microsoft technologies. Google Data Studio was just counter-intuitive to use, I didn't get very far with it, and Zoho had a lower barrier to entry for …
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
If you've got multiple applications to pull data from, Zoho Analytics is key. As soon as you get beyond hundreds, and into thousands of rows, I'd say you need a tool like Zoho Analytics. We've used it to analyze millions of rows and the engine seems to work well. If you've been able to utilize Excel to create visualizations, you'll find Zoho Analytics to be much more user friendly, in my opinion
It gives a single unified view everyday for our sales team to look at to track their progress and the progress of their peers in achieving the targets
It helps Account Executives to analyse their sales pipeline and find out the score for each deal and any high potential deal that is not getting enough attention
Some of our consultants have built very powerful stories on how and what impacts sales using storyboards and they are well understood by senior leadership
The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.
I'd give this an 11 if I could! As our business moves forward we hope to use Zoho Analytics more then we do now. Creating better reports and dashboards for our management team to evaluate the health of our business and to provide more insightful reports for our customers. The possibilities are endless with this tool
The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.
Zoho Analytics for ease of use and the overall end-user experience. It helps in maintaining data base and creating customized logical data. Report preparation becomes easy, and the visual representation creates a magical presentation. The meaningful data help in business analytics and projections helpful for planning futuristic strategy with the help of Data modelling and figures
ZOHO is a very reliable company/product. We never had any issues with downtime or inaccessibility to our data. Any type of maintenance that they had to perform was clearly communicated and never an issue. We use a lot of external hooks and we've never had any issues with getting ZOHO to communicate with any of those hooks.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.
ZOHO has obviously invested a lot of time effort and money in to creating a reliable infrastructure with high availability. We've never had any issues with performance and all of our data crunching small to large has always been well within reason. We have come to appreciate the performance of ZOHO and will continue to use it for all of our data needs.
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
The support team is honestly not that great. At times, it seems as if members of our own team know more about the product than the support team. They must not have a lot of training or the turnaround is quick
I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.
We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.
If your external data sources are previously organized and correlated (e.g.: in your datawarehouse or database) your implementation will be easier. Of cource some not previously predicted correlation would be necessary to be done during the implementation, but if your organization let it to be all done into Zoho Analytics, it will take more time from your team.
We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.
We used Yellowfin for 1 year and it really doesn't compare to Zoho Analytics because it doesn't have the native integration with ManageEngine's tools and the customization is more technical, Zoho Analytics lets you create dashboards automatically, immediately when you connect the data source (no matter if that is a MSSQL database, URL or an XLS file), maybe you will require custom some details in the dashboard, but it's not compared to create it from zero.
I have not really had problems with the operation of the platform; when I accessed it, I managed to do the work in the ideal times. The statistical development responds very quickly to the user’s requirements, and it is easy to extract the data to make the particular combinations that interest the industry.
As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.
