Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review Pros Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple. Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money. Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs. Read full review 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 Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Viewers are provided as "add-ons", this should be basic part of the package. Activity logs of every events is important for audit purpose. it should have been provided with every version. More generics and custom reports support. should be extensible Better aspects of Mobile views, UI/UX in small devices. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review 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
Dr. ROOPESH RAO Head Industry Institute Initiatives/Training and Placement Officer
Read full review Reliability and Availability The product has been reliable.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review In-Person Training This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The ability to create and refresh a report has helped to reduce over 50% of time required to prepare elaborate MIS on a monthly basis. It helped with analyzing data directly from the CRM and imported historical data at the same time. Read full review ScreenShots Zoho Analytics Screenshots