Overview
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
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.
Multiple tools in single package.
"Microsoft BI is a powerful analytic tool for large data sets."
In the world of data visualization, this is one of the best virtualization tools
"Easy To Use BI Platform With Effective Reporting"
Microsoft BI
Microsoft BI: The only data analysis tool you will ever need
MSBI - Bang for the Buck
A smart tool for data analysts to generate awesome reports
Excellent BI Stack for an all-in-one solution architecture, however may need specialized platforms for non-traditional datasets
Powerful tool for data visualization
Best when used by larger companies in a predominantly Microsoft environment
Microsoft PowerBI unleashes the power of your data
Microsoft BI the killer data analytics and visualization tool
Casual User’s POC
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Report sharing and collaboration (49)9.090%
- Report Formatting Templates (47)8.989%
- Formatting capabilities (49)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (49)8.080%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Power BI Pro
$9.99
Power BI Premium
4,995
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 9Pixel Perfect reports(42) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 8Customizable dashboards(49) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 8.9Report Formatting Templates(47) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 9Drill-down analysis(44) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 8Formatting capabilities(49) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 8.9Integration with R or other statistical packages(39) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 9Report sharing and collaboration(49) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 9Publish to Web(44) Ratings
- 9Publish to PDF(44) Ratings
- 8.9Report Versioning(40) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9Report Delivery Scheduling(43) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 8.9Delivery to Remote Servers(24) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 8.9Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(47) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 8.9Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(44) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 8.9Predictive Analytics(42) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
- 9Pattern Recognition and Data Mining(1) Ratings
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 8.9Multi-User Support (named login)(46) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 9Role-Based Security Model(43) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 9Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(46) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 9Report-Level Access Control(1) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
- 9Single Sign-On (SSO)(28) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 8Responsive Design for Web Access(36) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 8Mobile Application(27) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 9.9Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(36) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 8.9REST API(19) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 9Javascript API(19) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 9iFrames(18) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 9Java API(17) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 9Themeable User Interface (UI)(18) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 8Customizable Platform (Open Source)(17) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of visualization tools like Tableau or Qlik. Excel has historically been the platform visualization tool. Power BI for Office 365 has done much to improve the discovery and visualization capabilities of Excel.
Microsoft now offers Power BI cloud as the visualization platform with geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL along with charting and other data visualizations that can be uploaded and shared through the Power BI service.
The Power BI platform also provides live access to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instances, and self-service access to third-party cloud sources including Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and GitHub. Mobility is supported through a native iPad app, an iPhone app.
This new platform is viewed by Microsoft as a visualization layer sitting on top of their earlier generation of installed SQL-based technology.
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Competitors
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Technical Details
Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(934)Attribute Ratings
- 8Likelihood to Renew25 ratings
- 9.5Availability2 ratings
- 7Performance2 ratings
- 8.9Usability14 ratings
- 8.9Support Rating15 ratings
- 8.5Online Training2 ratings
- 6.9In-Person Training3 ratings
- 9.6Implementation Rating7 ratings
- 10Configurability2 ratings
- 6.8Data Visualization10 ratings
- 8.4Data Sources42 ratings
- 8.5Data Sharing and Collaboration43 ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)Powerful tool for data visualization
- Dashbaords
- Data collaberation
- Multiple connectors
- GIS data
- Easy formula writing
- Needs to be easier to share and collaborate
Less appropriate when you have data in various different formats and it not 100% clean. The licensing can be a pain if you are thinking of sharing the dashboards with external members.
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 90%9.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 100%10.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 70%7.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 90%9.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 80%8.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 100%10.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 60%6.0
- Publish to Web
- 80%8.0
- Publish to PDF
- 100%10.0
- Report Versioning
- 70%7.0
- Report Delivery Scheduling
- 70%7.0
- Delivery to Remote Servers
- 90%9.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 80%8.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 60%6.0
- Predictive Analytics
- 70%7.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 70%7.0
- Role-Based Security Model
- 80%8.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 100%10.0
- Single Sign-On (SSO)
- 100%10.0
- Responsive Design for Web Access
- 100%10.0
- Mobile Application
- 100%10.0
- Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
- 80%8.0
- REST API
- N/AN/A
- Javascript API
- N/AN/A
- iFrames
- N/AN/A
- Java API
- N/AN/A
- Themeable User Interface (UI)
- N/AN/A
- Customizable Platform (Open Source)
- N/AN/A
- Better presentation of data
- Cool visualization
- Easy to present data
- Information sharing
- Data visualization
- Predictive analytics
- Data visualization
- Ease of sharing data
- Consistent reporting
- Predictive analystics
- GIS mapping
- Central hub for reporting
It's Excel for Big Data. So easy, so cheap, so fast, and powerful enough most everything.
Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
- EASY visualization of business data. Excel is the killer app so anybody remotely good at basic office tools knows how to make PivotTables and PivotCharts. If you don't, it's really easy to learn; give it a try... People think big data visualization is hard but it's not for most business use cases.
- FAST visualization of business data. There are BI/Analytics tools out there, some of them beginning with the letter S, that are slooow. I do my taxes waiting for them to run basic queries/filters/charts. Microsoft BI (and Tableau, etc.) create compact data models to allow for pretty fast data loading and slicery.
- FREE or at least REALLY CHEAP visualization of business data. Who has MS Office on their business computer? Oh, everybody. If you don't have Office Pro, pony up for that or get the monthly license. The bigness of data you can run on your own machine is fairly big; don't use cloud if you don't need it. By comparison, who enjoys throwing thousands of dollars away on bloated legacy BI software? Well, too many companies, apparently.
- More than two dimensions. Yes, I know that 2D is the core of Excel's DNA. However, we're starting to deal with higher-dimensional arrays here in analytics land so better visualization support would be cool.
- UI weirdness. By default, you are flipping back between regular Excel tabs and super-top-secret BI tabs. You create charts in one place, but look at them in the other. That kind of stuff. I know there are a couple of other ways to interact with Microsoft BI, but please figure out the main way.
- Better hookups to other analytics tools including Microsoft's. Microsoft BI has a good variety of data connections, and I don't expect it to bloom into a full-fledged analytics tool, but it may be a good idea to keep hammering at connectivity with "hardcore" analytics. In my case, Python stuff.
Visualization of business data: it's good, fast, and cheap. What more can you ask? With more specialized visualization needs, use Tableau or write code. For complex scientific visualizations, write code.
It's also so much easier communicating about the tool and its visuals to other people who don't spend their lives analyzing complex data. "It's Excel for Big Data!" is really quite simple.
- Tableau Desktop, Google Analytics, Google Charts, SAP Crystal Reports, SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Analytics, QlikView and D3.js
- Programming packages. Free and powerful, they let you make any diagram, at the cost of difficulty of use.
- Specialist software like Tableau and Microsoft BI. This is the best choice in most cases due to ease of use and quality of output.
- More generic software offered by the big IT companies, often part of a BI suite. There's really a lot of variety here. Use this when it fits the workflow and you are already using the relevant software. But, personally, I'd still use the specialist software.
- Pixel Perfect reports
- 100%10.0
- Customizable dashboards
- 100%10.0
- Report Formatting Templates
- 100%10.0
- Drill-down analysis
- 80%8.0
- Formatting capabilities
- 60%6.0
- Integration with R or other statistical packages
- 50%5.0
- Report sharing and collaboration
- 100%10.0
- Publish to Web
- 60%6.0
- Publish to PDF
- 60%6.0
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- 80%8.0
- Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- 70%7.0
- Predictive Analytics
- 20%2.0
- Multi-User Support (named login)
- 50%5.0
- Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- 50%5.0
- Familiarity. It's Excel. It's a spreadsheet. Come on.
- Thinking in matrices (PivotTables) takes a little getting used to, but it's not hard. For people without a good high school math background, it may seem unintuitive.
- Charts and PivotCharts are fairly easy, but Microsoft has a ways to go to make them less ugly.
- Data source connections. It's sometimes difficult to replace and update connections.
- Dropping certain types of fields into the Pivot Table (example: default aggregation type for values).
- The weird interface. Microsoft tried to have it both ways by using the standard Excel interface for some tasks, and the "Power" interface for others. It's just awkward, cumbersome, and confusing.
Great value for money with Microsoft's BI
- SQL Server Management Studio provides a nice interface to view, query, and modify the database tables. The interface is user friendly and logical.
- Microsoft, in general, has fantastic educational pricing. This allowed the TCO to be much lower for our university.
- Microsoft tools integrate nicely with one another. We are also in the process of implementing SharePoint. We plan to use SSRS (.rdl) reports which will integrate with SharePoint - and also will have the ability to experiment with PowerView (.rdlx) dashboards and PowerPivot (Microsoft's in-memory BI tool).
- The end-user reporting tool, Report Builder, is not that flexible. We feel that the Cognos Report Studio tool is more robust in this area.
- Firstly, reduction in cost from the three previous vendors which we were supporting. Just by replacing these legacy pieces of software, we have saved money.
- We are working to quantify the cost savings achieved in business improvement from the reporting that we have provided. We don't have a specific figure as of yet, but the reports that are now available 'on-the-fly' have saved many man hours. Previously, data needed to be consolidated across multiple systems which could have taken weeks of manual manipulation. Now, this data is available in one platform and we have cross-functional reporting capability.
- We use the database platform to warehouse the data from our disparate admissions, student information, human resources, finance, and advancement systems.
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is used to move the data from these ERPs into staging - then onto our dimension model and SSAS cubes.
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is used to report on this dimensional data and provide parameterized, drill-through reporting.
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is used to build cubes for specific functional areas. These cubes can then connect back to the dimensional data as required for drill-through analysis.
- Using the enterprise version, we leveraged data-driven subscriptions. This feature allows you to publish reports to specific individuals or groups based upon data events. This has become useful for a wide variety of things. In a previous company, I used this feature to drive process improvements by notifying teams of early task completion. In some cases, we were able to drive a process that typically took 4 weeks down to a process that only took 2.5 weeks. That led to revenue gains.
- Since Microsoft BI contains an out-of-the-box ETL tool (SSIS), we've been able to leverage this functionality to help support other projects. Recently, we created a SalesForce integration to Workday.
- We have been able to setup nightly data feeds using SSIS which extract known sets of data for our statisticians. While the data isn't formatted in SAS dataset, it outputs the data in a common format that is easy for the statisticians to consume and transform into a useful SAS dataset.
- Implemented in-house
- Professional services company
- Self-taught
- Ellucian Banner.
- Workday HCM.
- Workday Financials.
- PeopleSoft Admissions.
- Apply Yourself.
- Sage Millennium.
- We will continue to support systems that are key pillars to our business units.
Microsoft BI platform review
- Easy development tools with ability to support large data.
- Features of the predictive analytics are not the best in the industry yet.
- Rapid report development, simple web-based reporting tools, easy support, common development techniques.
- SQL Server Data Warehouse and Microsoft BI platform allow us to collect data from transactional sources, transform to reportable format, and aggregate to a level that can be used to measure business operational metrics.
- Implemented in-house
- Self-taught
- Microsoft SharePoint
Why is Microsoft BI Right for Me?
- SSIS is by far the easiest and most efficient ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tool available, after trying many different tools over the years there is no tool that is more flexible and easier to develop solutions with. What takes days/weeks or longer to setup in other tools can be done in at least half the time and perform better.
- SSRS is one of the best web reporting tools available for companies of any size that doesn't require you to re-architect your entire existing database structure. SSRS can connect to all of the major databases and work with data from multiple of them all in the same report. For web reporting that needs to be up and running fast, but be secure and easy to develop on there is no better tool available today.
- SSAS is for more in depth analysis of your data and it has the same capabilities as all other Microsoft tools to connect to multiple data sources and present the data to the user in standardized format. Most users will love that they can access so much of the companies data in Excel using the PivotTables that they probably already use today, but now you are controlling the data and know that it is the correct data. With the new Tabular capabilities in SQL Server 2012 and up it allows end users to help build the initial version of these complex data structures which can then be migrated over to IT to add security, automation and quality control to the final solution.
- The development tools for Microsoft BI in SQL Server 2012 and up are in a bit of flux at the moment. Initially with SQL Server 2012 they were all fully integrated and available with the installer, but now they have moved to it being a separate web download that you have know which version you need to get it working correctly with the version of SQL Server you are working on. Thankfully all of these tools still use Visual Studio as the starting point, but it would be nice to see the tools better integrated going forward and still able to be updated on a regular basis.
- SSRS has not seen any major updates in the last couple of versions of SQL Server and it could really benefit from some of the new advancements that Microsoft has made with the Power BI line of products that are only available if you use the cloud based Office 365 service. It would be really nice to see some of the features that are available in Power BI added to SSRS to make it a more complete web based reporting tool and more accessible to end users as well as IT.