iCharts vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Screenful

The iCharts has suited our organization work as it has helped us a lot in our internal and external works. As we use iCharts for the internal team in representing the working reports and data of the business in an accurate manner. It helps in representing the presentation to the client to showcase our work and present him the data and work flow through the iCharts. As I don't found anything missing in this software.

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.

Incentivized

I feel for collaborative teams who like to work together, Screenful can be a really effective platform. For example, I clearly see the benefit for sales, account management, and marketing teams to collaborate using this dashboard. When I used it, it really made our work easy. On the flip side, I feel teams who rather work in silos, this tool is not a good return on investment.

Incentivized

• Their new platform is easy to navigate
• We had a dedicated support person to help set up searches and train in the use of iCharts
• Separate Dashboards for each group

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

• Burndown charts.
• Milestone completion.
• Team task allocation and man hours spent.

Incentivized

• The new platform has limitations on colors and sizing
• iCharts seem to have closed its doors without notification and now we have a product with no support

Incentivized

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

• I feel there is room for improvement when it comes to supporting guides, knowledge centers.
• Also, customer support options might a good resource to have.
• I have always liked tools that show what similar teams are doing to use the tool. Like a case study. I did not find that here.

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.

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

I haven't experience any other alternative product of this.

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

Screenful has a clear advantage over Tableau because it is much easier to integrate with Jira and GitHub. Screenful gives powerful ready-made project planning visualisations that would be difficult to build from Tableau. Screenful is also much better than Geckoboard in terms of integration with Jira and GitHub as well as better project planning visualisations.

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

• In terms of ROI and value there has been a positive impact for sure.
• In terms of product updates and new integrations, I feel there is room for improvement.
• It gets the basic features and APIs right which I love.

Incentivized