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
Sigma
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Sigma Computing headquartered in San Francisco provides a suite of data services such as code free data modeling, data search and explorating, and related BI and data visualization services.
Sigma Computing is significantly faster and more versatile than Data Studio integrations for marketing data. While it is less powerful than Tableau for data visualization, it is much easier to use due to its spread sheet like user interface. Microsoft BI is a middle ground but …
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.
Its a great tool to have. The ability to come in the morning and by using the report being able see how the day will go. Seeing the goal and the current inventory and also to be able to adjust as the day goes on. With the report updates the report as changes to the inventory happen live or if any issues arise. being able to see that live and being to react quickly.
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.
Viewer level license is quite limited. These users can't download data or even add filters on datasets. Something to keep in mind.
Directly querying the underlying data warehouse will lead to increased usage. Not a big deal on something like Redshift, but your Snowflake consumption will increase, potentially by a lot.
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.
Sigma has helped us a lot and has become an integral part of our daily workflow. It would be difficult to switch to another platform and have to rebuild the numerous metrics and performance reports that we have already established
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.
It has a clean and modern interface. However, it is not completely intuitive. I think it would be better and easier to navigate with more Windows style drop down menus and/or tabls. There is a significant learning curve, but that may be due in part to the technical nature of this type of software tool.
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.
Support team is helpful in answering questions and providing help with using the UI. There are knowledgeable people within the support team. There are also good online support tools. There are significant community support resources available. There is however lack of a live support. It would be useful to have live phone number or chat to use.
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.
Sigma is by far the best. It is easiest to learn and easiest to use on a day to day basis. I never have to wait for dashboards to load and it's very easy to understand the variables that are going into my visualizations. Best of all I can manipulate the data within Sigma very easily. In these other platforms data manipulation is difficult or must be done in the data warehouse
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.
Monitoring health of cloud platform has allowed the company to anticipate issues before they affect customers – Sigma prompted us building a canary monitoring process that provides customer container health.
Customer success has used an activity report to discover customers running runaway processes that they were unaware of, creating an alert to contact the customer and prevent an embarrassing situation.
Customer success uses the activity report to prompt conversations regarding increases or declines in behavior that led to increasing contract limits or addressing churn concerns.
