A self-service BI solution, Astrato puts analytics in the hands of every user, enabling them to build their own reports and answer data questions without IT help. Astrato accelerates adoption, speeds up decision-making, and unifies analytics, embedded analytics, data input, and data apps in one platform. With Astrato, Self-Service business users can see and understand data that resides in the Data Cloud (Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Dremio,…
$12
per month per user
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score8.5 out of 10
N/A
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.
Astrato Analytics provides a feature-rich application that it easy to use for the non-technical user yet robust enough to create a sophisticated SaaS application. Astrato Analytics provides native integration to all the major large cloud data platforms and the implementation is very straight forward. The value provided through their feature-rich platform and competitive pricing is unmatched.
Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Writeback to the database is simple and straightforward and allows us to build apps in the tool with a level of interation that is not possible with other BI tools
Version control that is built into the workbooks allows us to quickly deploy changes without the fear of losing the older version and maintianing both a historcal updates and the ability to rollback
Easy connectivity to a wide range of data platforms including Snowflake, Databricks, and Google Workspace within the same tenant allows us to leverage data from each of these platforms for specific use cases
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The product is still young, as a consequence, some features aren't as mature as competitors. Astrato has worked to catch up quickly, by rolling out new features regularly
Better ability to control icons and themes from a central point, instead of having to add/change them on each report
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
It is a very intuitive system, a pleasure to use, practical and simple, for medium to advanced activities. BI supervisors are delighted with much of the functionality, but highlight some weaknesses that they still have, such as the loading speed in HEIC-type files.
Without a doubt, it is a tool that has become essential in our business routine.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. TR verified that a representative sample of customers was invited. More Info
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.
To scale PowerBi, we would have needed a staff of technical folks and a substantial budget, and we still probably could not have created the robust SaaS application we did with Astrato Analytics. Astrato Analytics allowed for a staff of two to create and rollout a SaaS Application in under 60 days and provided hands on support to us as needed. There really is no comparison.
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
