Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$9.99
per user/per month
Qlik Analytics Platform
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
The Qlik Analytics Platform (QAP) is a developer platform for building custom analytic applications based on rich frontend and backend APIs. It gives full API access to the Qlik associative engine to build rich data-driven analytic applications, for example when building web applications for extranet and Internet deployment.
N/A
Pricing
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Qlik Analytics Platform
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$9.99
per user/per month
Power BI Premium
4,995
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Qlik Analytics Platform
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Qlik Analytics Platform
Considered Both Products
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
No answer on this topic
Qlik Analytics Platform
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Qlik Analytics Platform
They are all good tools, each having their own pros and cons. Qlik Analytics Platform was easy to set up, more than affordable, and has a good user base. Though not as large as some of the other tools, it is growing every day and for the price, it is very hard to beat. I would …
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.
Qlik Analytics Platform has helped us track turnaround time as well as sales volumes. We can display metrics in a multitude of ways and can then slice it up in even more ways by adding filters. It is nice that you can filter down the data by essentially "Qliking" anywhere to find insights. Qlik Analytics Platform has been extremely beneficial in reducing manual reports. We are able to automate numerous reports in addition to setting up alerts, through Nprinting, that will notify users when certain metrics are hit. For example, if our turnaround time exceeds a certain number, we can alert business stakeholders so they can take a closer look. We can also send notifications to sales representatives when their territories are underperforming.
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.
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.
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.
Customer support is provided through resellers, and finding the right reseller for your context can be a challenge. However our support from our last two resellers/partners has been largely very good. The online community is strong, though obviously doesn't replace having local technical experts working with the product and managing it.
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.
Qlik is a platform with more scaling ability and functionality compared to PowerBI. PowerBI is the prior step before passing to Qlik, however, Qlik provides more functions and abilities to the business domain unit with better management capabilities for the IT team that set it up. In the end, we implemented Qlik for functionality and scalability.
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.
