Likelihood to Recommend As per my knowledge and Altair Product experience, It is really a good product that comes with multiple features like IoT, BigData, dashboards, and other things. I personally really enjoyed using the services provided by Altair. It is well suited for the organizations who don't spend much time setting up their own platform, maintenance, and much more because Altair not only provides the platform but they will care about your products with good customer support and maintenance. I only found a bit low in the case of machine learning and AI products because I have checked different products that provide these services with good accuracy.
Read full review 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 Pros The global navigation bar with links to the library for easy access and management within the platform. Simplified task viewer where we can find the profile, performance, help, resources and a link also to manage your account. System administrators can define profiles for task execution. Read full review 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 Cons Integration with other systems could be better. Ability to handle large amount of data. Expertise services might be better. Read full review 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 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 Usability Very user-friendly UI and visual representation is also good for the price offered. Good tool but lacks some advanced and AI-based insights. It has an edge over other tools for the price of this tool. It has some great potential and i would consider this in my top 5 when considering tools of this domain
Read full review 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 Reliability and Availability The product has been reliable.
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 Support Rating I only had one problem with the software, and the support system response was very quick.
Read full review 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 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 Alternatives Considered Altair smart sight stacks up against all the products mentioned above because it comes with a wide variety of applications and services like Big Data, IoT services, Embedded systems, cloud-based service, data visualization, Machine learning, dashboarding, and much more. I have used the other products like Logi Composer,
Tableau CRM, and PowerBI but they only handle the specific use cases. So Because of that Altair Smartsight really provide a good and wide range of solution.
Read full review 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 Return on Investment The workflow interface consists of the workflow canvas where we do our actual pipeline and workflow execution log, display information and each process. You can use it to create a workflow and the available execution profiles in which to run them. We currently have one session running for each workflow. Read full review 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 ScreenShots Altair SmartSight Screenshots