Logi Info vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Logi Composer is the best of the product range that Logi Analytics offers; Logi Info is, in my mind, a terrible experience and should be discontinued. Logi Info is not a BI tool and many CEOs and product managers believe it is. Instead, it is a tool for web developers to create IIS apps with a library of BI-type components, and with everything else having to be hand-coded in JavaScript and CSS. Maybe this was cool back in the early 2000s when Logi Info came about, but today I'd recommend using Visual Studio, C#, .NET, and finding a NuGet package for your visualisations if you wanted to go the route of making your own web app. This said, where it is suited is if you have a burning desire to make a stand-alone IIS-based web application and you don't need or want to leverage any existing skills in .NET or PHP or other frameworks/languages. Instead, you want to use the Logi Info XML-based BI widgets and you're happy to make something quick without needing it to look really awesome.

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.

• Clear/Concise view of data. Easily intuitive, amazing drill down capability, fully user configurable panels and dashboards.
• Self-Service is such a powerful tool for facilities that want to create/design their own reports/dashboards, it's instantly recognized as being very powerful and agile.
• Logi software makes the designer realize that they should think outside the box and not stick with "it's how we have always done it limitation". It allows you to be very creative.

• 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

• It is not always intuitive to incorporate JavaScript into Logi Info. The tools are all available, but the process requires multiple resource in translating between Logi and JavaScript.
• The toolbox is too vast for Logi to provide a 'quick implementation' or 'quick start guide'. There are so many tools that Logi expects the client to determine which fit their use case. There are purchasable 'Professional Services' options for implementation, but without these, the toolset is almost too big.

• 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

Logi Info is a very outdated, archaic product that tries to build .NET / Java web apps using an obscure XML-based markup language to implement BI widgets, with a lot of extra CSS/JavaScript needed on your own to make it do the best things. There are many other better tools. It is not a BI tool, and as a web development tool it's not great either. I'd recommend getting some good third-party .NET BI library if you want your web devs to make the reports, otherwise use a proper BI tool like Power BI or Tableau, or even Logi Composer (formerly ZoomData before Logi acquired it.)

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.

I am giving 9 rating because the Logi Info still needs to improve on the tutorials part and make it easy for the beginners. Otherwise, it's a very good analytics tool which offers more than 20 types of visualization. It's predictive analysis feature and easy to embed with technologies make it stand out in the market.

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.

The support process is bit slow and has a good scope improvement but overall it's good as team is very supportive. They generally take 1-2 days time to respond emails sent to them but some times a delay is also expected. Overall, I did not face any major issues using the service.

Incentivized

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.

Logi gave us the flexibility we needed to meet the configurable nature of our product and for the need to create custom reports. Other products did not allow flexbility to generate reports via script as was one of our primary requirements.

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

• By embedding Logi in our solution and using the Logi Self-Service Module we can provide this flexibility to our users without requiring custom development work for each new request.
• We succeeded in developing embedded self-service analytics at scale with a combination of Logi analytics as front-end and a Cassandra data lake with Spark aggregation algorithms as back-end.
• We analyze the insurance industry and need to replicate different data formats across hundreds of databases to support multi-tenant (customer) BI reports and "ad hoc" data review on millions or hundreds of millions of records per customer.

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