Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Phrazor vs. Stytch

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

Phrazor is well suited for use in larger companies, especially those that operate globally and need to get region-specific or country-specific data and reports. I found Phrazor to be less appropriate for use in smaller companies (especially non-profit organizations) that may not benefit from extensive reporting. Non-profit organizations don't necessarily have projected sales growth and inventory costs.

Incentivized

Their support team is very responsive. I've even had the founder respond to multiple questions of mine across email and Slack. Incredible pace of product innovation as well, so I'm confident they'll keep delivering new solutions that we can weave into our own product. We'll be a customer of theirs for a long time to come.

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

• Custom reporting.
• Report templates.
• Unique data not found elsewhere.

Incentivized

• All the passwordless options we need
• Clear documentation and support
• Affordable price for the value we get

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

• More training videos for beginners.
• Customizable report printing layouts.
• Additional reporting measures.

Incentivized

• I'd trust them to handle more user management

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

Our company experienced some difficulty during implementation trying to get data imported and uploaded. We reached out to support and received much-needed assistance, and we were able to move forward with data importation. Several of our users, including myself, experienced some difficulty in understanding the system, so it took some time to use it fully. For a first-time user, there were almost too many filters and options to choose from.

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

Great! Anytime I needed assistance and reached out to support, I received amazing help, and everyone was always very nice. The reason I did not rate support a ten is that often the hold time was quite long. When you are in a time crunch and need data immediately, it is frustrating not to get immediate support.

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.

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 enjoyed using Phrazor better; however, as a new user, I was a bit frustrated getting started. Microsoft Power BI had more videos available online than I found. Phrazor had more adaptability and customization for our company, which overall made it a better fit over competitive products. My coworkers and I demoed Sisense, and we chose not to purchase it due to it not being a good fit.

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

• Great tool for creating annual budgets.
• Reports and graphs that can be included in annual report - saved on marketing costs.
• Able to import from excel which is a cost-saving tool for our company.

Incentivized

• Immediately saved time on upfront development costs
• Saved money on ongoing support of custom development
• Saved time debugging in a clean, easy-to-use dashboard as opposed to pouring over our own logs
• Passwordless authentication has reduced typical login support as well

Incentivized