Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Progress Telerik

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.

Progress Telerik UI is one of the best web design and development solutions for Dot Net based applications. It has extensible support for ASP.NET Core, C#, WCF, and ASP.NET WebForms. It overall improves the design structure for the applications and provides multiple customization options to meet the requirements of clients and end-users.

Incentivized

• The layout of Power BI is very intuitive. Someone that is familiar with Excel and working with Charts and Graphs in that environment will find the learning curve a rather short one to start using Power BI.
• I like the way Power BI fits an assortment of users and how the functionality that you engage is replicated in Excel, that being Power Query and Power Pivot. So what you learn in one tool can be readily applied towards the other which allows you to more effectively apply your training.
• I appreciate how Microsoft is working to develop tools that go a long ways to empowering the end user. Prior to Power BI I would have had to consult with a "BI" professional to develop a dashboard. With Power BI I don't have to consult with anyone, I can work to put together the dash board I want and using a tool set that is really robust and allows me to engage an enormous amount of data. It's provides a great deal of flexibility and the types of data I can connect to.
• Updates...Microsoft is working diligently to keep Power BI current with monthly updates. They do a really good job of listening to the end user, if there is functionality not currently present just give them a month or so.
• Just to be clear, even though it's easy to get going right out of the gate with Power BI it provides plenty of opportunities to create some really sophisticated reporting solutions. With DAX in Power Pivot and M language in Power Query, you are provided with plenty of head room to do some really amazing things in Power BI.
• Training...there are resources across the web for learning and growing your skills and Power BI. And what's even better is the majority of those resources are free.
• Data engagement, when presenting the data to the end user Power BI goes a long way to allowing that end user to engage the data and begin to identify root cause by simply interacting with the graph/chart/data set. It allows for really fluid engagement. Prior to Power BI so many times during the presentation of data we often times ended the engagement with that data with more questions than what were answered. With Power BI, more often than not, the end user is able to get answers to the questions by simply clicking on the data in the graph/chart/dataset to see the details. This tool really does have the capacity to make you look like a rock star.

Incentivized

• Telerik enables rapid application development for the demonstration of concepts.
• It provides a good set of themes and functional additions to a UI development environment.
• Each control is packed with valuable features.
• The support team is responsive and very knowledgeable about making their product work in whatever situation you need.

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

• I have not worked with the App Builder but I think a GUI for dragging and dropping components to build a web page would be great.
• In addition to the app builder there should some tools to design a responsive web application to see the results for different screen sizes.

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 Telerik UI has become part of our staple development tools. We can not be as productive without the feature set available to us in the Telerik UI ASP.NET AJAX control package.

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 UX of their UI is very well thought out, the micro-interactions are intuitive - thus great for your end user as less training is needed. Using the software, there [are] loads to get you going, you can download their whole demo site and see how each demo works. There is more now on github to get you started, also much on an awesome CDN that's well bedded in so your app is speedy and up to date.

Reports are stable and always avaiable when needed.

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.

Progress Telerik UI customer support is pretty good. The ticketing system allows a thread of questions, answers, and attachments of code and screenshots. Response time is fairly quick and often has code snippets or pointers to online examples that could be relevant. There is a large amount of community support forums to get answers or post questions. In addition there is a forum of posted code samples for the various controls. The Progress update tool easily tells you what products have been updated and allows you to install the updates on your development system. Release notes can be displayed to see what's new.

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.

The controls work very well as long as they are used as intended. Built-in functionality should be used whenever possible,

Incentivized

We use Microsoft BI because our organization has all of its software in the Microsoft ecosystem. It just made sense to utilize Microsoft BI because it can so seamlessly connect to all of the other Microsoft tools and data sources that we were using before. We often find that more people have experience with Microsoft BI than other tools that we looked at due to its popularity and widespread use within other organizations.

Incentivized

The Telerik controls were just easier for us to use and implement. Our evaluation of control packages was over 9 years ago, so it is hard to recall the major differences. Generally, the team preferred what Telerik had to offer, particularly the fact that the bundle provided controls, not just for the ASP.NET context, but also Windows applications, and the cross-platform contexts as well.

• Profit increase due to MSBI output and a better understanding of multiple functions other than cost.
• Data compatibility will be improved, and MSBI will have the opportunity to handle the API more effectively. The MSBI ETL stack works well with relational databases, but with cloud-based data sources emerging, non-relational data sources should be supported.
• Save time interpreting data. Our analytics capabilities have helped our clients understand complex data with simple reports. Thus, it facilitated decision-making.

Incentivized

• Provides rapid development - it has helped me create multiple web applications in MVC and Angular within a one-month time frame.
• Our clients were facing challenges (taking time to load applications, grid view, and generating reports ) with asp.net web applications. Using Kendo UI we have migrated the ASP.NET application to MVC within a one-month time frame. The client was very happy with the application's performance and responsive UI.

Incentivized