Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Talend Data Fabric

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.

Truly trusted contact center where the effective solution is always guaranteed. It is not a one-off fix to a specific data integration or management problem. It is a permanent and scalable solution to manage all of your data under a unified environment. Easy to use, great performance, used it for our internal data warehouse. Easy to build and connect to our data sources such as Salesforce, Netsuite, and Marketo.

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

• It supports a wide variety of connectors (Systems/endpoints)
• It provides great flexibility for developers as it not only has a lot of predefined ready to use the function but also provides the ability to use complex java code within the platform. Great tool if you have good developers available.

Incentivized

• 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

• The print and export functionality are missing in the Community version which frustrates a lot of our clients as well as internal users.
• The learning curve is very steep for all Talend products including DQ.
• Lack of easy to create workflows for jobs that can be repeated.

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.

Lack of report export and publication! Steep learning curve!

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

At this moment the usability of Talend Data Quality is optimal, too bad I cannot say the same in the first three months, it was always a problem due to its steep learning curve, but what matters is being able to use it effectively at this precise moment.

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.

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.

Talend Data Quality gave us direct help in the learning process and prevented us from taking many more months to adapt and I appreciate this from the heart, I think that thanks to the support we can have very detailed reports that help increase the use of Talend Data Quality in the company.

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

The engine with which it works to process a lot of information is striking, the comparison also being the connectors it has for different RDBMS, which other tools do not count as they are GNU licenses or community editions. The friendly and intuitive environment is what catches the eye. that's why I choose Talend over any other tool

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

• Definitely simplified the development efforts on our end in doing the data integration, saving lots of human hours.
• Small company, so cost could be a problem for these services, but works so far.

Incentivized