Likelihood to Recommend Chartio is a great tool for building presentable dashboards. It can export, you can add read-only access, and it has permissions levels by dashboard for users. There are other data analysis tools that help to analyze the data, but few allow for such a nice presentation
Kyle Epps Sr. Manager, Business Operations and Technology
Read full review If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.
Read full review Pros Direct linkage to our databases. Abstracts away the visualization layer so we can focus on the data and the queries. Host of graphs and tools that permits all types of data visualizations. Haven't quite used this yet, but there is a new embedding feature that will be very helpful so that we can embed the charts into a company central dash. Read full review Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that. Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem. Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard. Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted. Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code. Read full review Cons There is not a last full month date range option. You can still get the range that you need, but the dashboards will have to be manually updated to exclusively display one whole month. When building a chart, the area which displays your tables and fields is finite. You can't adjust the size to make it easier to see. They do allow a mouse-over to see the entire name of your table/field, but I would prefer to adjust the width. Once you modify a query in the Custom Query tab, there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to using the U.I. Read full review Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software. Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version. Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Great customer support: You will receive an answer by email usually within 20-30 minutes. Not only that but our CSMs for Chartio go out of their way to help, they have even created charts for some of the less experienced users that wanted an example to work from. We have had nothing but great experiences with this team.
Read full review I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)
Read full review Usability I really like using Chartio. I use it on a daily basis for pulling data from different sources and combining data (the explore tab was a great idea for this use). I think I would give it 8/10 because there needs to be more documentation or maybe blog posts about things people are doing with it. I only have my own ideas about what to do /how to graph things. I know there are some articles, but it would be awesome to have a section on the neat dashboards people are building or how they show data in different ways. Another complaint is how much time it takes to load. I know our databases aren't set up precisely for Chartio and I have been creating data stores. But the data stores have so many more limitations that adds a whole new layer of frustration. Love the product, keep up the good work and the fast fixes.
Read full review We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.
Read full review Support Rating as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.
Read full review Online Training I use self learning materials. Pretty helpful. I find myself having to go back to the "drilldown" instructions though, and have a hard time finding hidden variables on a dashboard, so perhaps there is room for intuitive improvements (or maybe I'm just being lazy)
Read full review Alternatives Considered Chartio so far has been the easiest BI tool to setup and has also been the most affordable. There are some other, great, BI tools out there but they were a bit to heavy handed for what we needed. Also - despite the high cost per user in Chartio, the other tools were still more expensive.
Read full review Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports.
Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible
Read full review Scalability Chartio has worked well as our datawarehouse has rapidly expanded, and the usability/performance hasn't seemed to have suffered. What we haven't yet realized is additional savings from additional users. We have some dashboard needs for users who truly just view of a few charts, and the licensing structure hasn't yet been structured in a way that would support that type of approach...having 50 "core" licenses, and then potentially several hundred view only licenses for partners that would use the application infrequently.
Read full review Return on Investment As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise. One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual. Read full review ScreenShots Chartio (discontinued) Screenshots