Displayr vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Displayr is perfectly suited for any insights or data people that understand the type of analysis they want to do, but don't know R code - or just want to get to results more quickly than coding themselves. It's probably not the best learning ground, if you've never done any quantitative analysis before, but then neither are traditional tools like SPSS or Q.

Incentivized

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.

• The intuitive interface and menus make it easy to quickly learn Displayr and find the types of data transformation or analysis that we're looking to do.
• The support level from Displayr's team is FIRST CLASS. Where othe platforms force you to an FAQ or AI chat bot, Displayr's team will jump in first hand, into our data, or on a live call, and help us run a new type of analysis or troubleshoot a problem.
• The ability to work collaboratively, asynchronously and remotely, on the same data set and report is a really huge plus for us.
• The in-built options for multivariate analysis cover 99.9% of anything we have - or will - ever need to run.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The new "glow-up" on the interface has helped make it a bit easier on the eye, but there are some features of working in the "three pane" browser that are a bit frustrating: especially having to 'rearrange' when resizing the window to look at another app simultaneously.
• Such a small point, but being able to drag and move multiple elements in a table (eg drag two rows to the top) SIMULTANEOUSLY would help a bunch.
• I don't think we take advantage of all the visualisation capabilities in Displayr, and perhaps an AI 'recommendation' engine that sees the data I'm working with and prompts either a specific visualisation, or additional analysis option I might use, would be great.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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's really quite intuitive, but the visual interface could be made a bit more easy to use (window/pane rescaling etc) and I think there could be more 'proactive prompts' to suggest features we're underutilising.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

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.

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.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

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.

SPSS (the last version I looked at) still requires much more underlying knowledge and coding ability to get where we want to be. That's not where we add value, so the speed and simplicity with which Displayr allows us to get the data analysis done, and move onto developing insight and delivering value is why I chose Displayr.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• I think Displayr is quite expensive, but has the biggest impact on our P&L of any of our subscriptions, because it has unlocked our ability to deliver bigger, more complex analytic projects for clients - and hence grow our topline.
• The ability to scale the license between years has also been a god-send as our team has gone up or down to deliver the level of quant work available to us.
• There's also a bottom line efficiency driven by some of the speed of analysis that Displayr enables.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized