Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. ThoughtSpot

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
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.
$14
per month per user
ThoughtSpot
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
ThoughtSpot is an Agentic Analytics Platform for enterprises where users ask data questions using natural language and get answers with AI. Code-first for data teams and code-free for business users, ThoughtSpot can handle large, complex cloud data at scale.
$1,500
per year (5 users)
Pricing
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$14
per month per user
Power BI Premium
$24
per month per user
Thoughtspot Analytics - Pro
$50
per month (billed annually) per user (25-1000 users)
Thoughtspot Analytics - Enterprise
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Considered Both Products
Microsoft BI (MSBI)

No answer on this topic

ThoughtSpot
Chose ThoughtSpot
The main reason for selecting Thoughtspot was to share reporting with other external vendors and ease of doing business.
Features
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
9.0
53 Ratings
9% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.3
89 Ratings
11% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.646 Ratings6.021 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.653 Ratings8.289 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates9.051 Ratings7.725 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.6
53 Ratings
7% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.5
91 Ratings
7% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.648 Ratings8.590 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.353 Ratings7.290 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.442 Ratings5.849 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.053 Ratings8.788 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.6
52 Ratings
5% above category average
ThoughtSpot
8.3
84 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web9.448 Ratings8.255 Ratings
Publish to PDF9.248 Ratings8.678 Ratings
Report Versioning7.544 Ratings7.918 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.647 Ratings8.464 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.626 Ratings8.135 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.8
52 Ratings
10% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.4
86 Ratings
8% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.651 Ratings7.585 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.848 Ratings7.579 Ratings
Predictive Analytics7.945 Ratings7.665 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining8.86 Ratings7.013 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
9.3
53 Ratings
9% above category average
ThoughtSpot
8.1
86 Ratings
5% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.549 Ratings8.382 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model9.447 Ratings8.074 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.049 Ratings7.878 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control9.46 Ratings7.916 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.531 Ratings8.672 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.1
42 Ratings
4% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.4
53 Ratings
5% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access8.239 Ratings7.151 Ratings
Mobile Application8.030 Ratings7.034 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.939 Ratings6.946 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.6
24 Ratings
11% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.2
51 Ratings
7% below category average
REST API9.321 Ratings7.042 Ratings
Javascript API8.921 Ratings6.635 Ratings
iFrames8.920 Ratings8.134 Ratings
Java API8.918 Ratings7.013 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)8.221 Ratings7.335 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)7.519 Ratings7.115 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Small Businesses
Yellowfin
Yellowfin
Score 8.7 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 10.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Enterprises
Kyvos Semantic Layer
Kyvos Semantic Layer
Score 9.5 out of 10

No answers on this topic

All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(73 ratings)
8.5
(91 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(25 ratings)
10.0
(6 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(15 ratings)
8.3
(85 ratings)
Availability
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(15 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
In-Person Training
6.9
(3 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.5
(2 ratings)
4.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.6
(7 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft BI (MSBI)ThoughtSpot
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
It is well suited when the same data is consumed by many different people with different analytics and visualization requirements because, if you have the data available in ThoughtSpot, every user can prepare different views. Also, it is a good reporting tool, you can get rid of slides if you have a good dashboard prepared, gaining flexibility and agility.
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
  • Beautiful visualizations. The visuals are distinct, clean, and easy to discern from one another.
  • Intelligent querying functionality. When looking to manipulate the data, the search function makes it easy to manipulate the features in the data, along with aggregating them in the way you'd like.
  • Embedding! It has been a smooth process thus far for our product & technical teams to work with ThoughtSpot and bring it into our product.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • 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
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
  • It would be great if ThoughtSpot can add the feature to filter by clicking on visualizations. i.e if I click on a particular data point in the chart if the full dashboard can filter just for that particular data point.
  • Color coding the heatmap with different colors like green to orange to red.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
I give it just waiting because passport is brilliant and it has helped our organisation In advancing to the next stage in the age of AI. It has allowed or non-tech people to better service and clients in a cost-effective way. George port has allowed us to create new products for us and for our clients increasing our revenue streams and reducing clients churn
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Usability
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
The rating is because of the ease of use of the interface as it has a no code interface that makes it easy to setup data pipelines without extensive programming. Cloud native integration: It integrates seamlessly with cloud based data warehouses. Automated data loading, Scalability, Cost Effective, Transformations, Data Governance and security.
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Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
The product has been reliable.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
it's available unless there is a server or system update etc. sometimes the timing of this is bad (for example during a month end close)
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
It does what it is supposed to. Would be nice to have a bit more insights
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
I give it this meeting because the team is not only help able to help us in the current solutions but also amazing and taking feedback and feeding it back to their development team which includes more products and features into ThoughtSpot
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.
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ThoughtSpot
inhouse in-person training. Took a bit to long to get the basics.
Read full review
Online Training
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
poor instructions
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
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.
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ThoughtSpot
Understand use case and model and design accordingly
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Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
We also explored Tableau Ask Data. Tableau is our standard for BI in our organization. We want to use the smallest amount of tools in our company to have the best adaption. ThoughSpot will fill a few gaps that we have with our current set up and will also enhance out offering for our employees in the transition of being more data driven within in near future
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Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
ThoughtSpot
Because it is very reliable, inside the situation, we need strong internet connection to access a lot of data but easily never had any downtime except during the upgrades
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Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
ThoughtSpot
  • Time to market ROI is massive vs hiring the full-time dedicated team to build and maintain a frontend multi-tenant SaaS data viz product.
  • It will be interesting to see over time how the advanced features play out in terms of usability and end value, such as Natural Search, which we are very excited about, and the machine learning tools.
Read full review
ScreenShots

ThoughtSpot Screenshots

Screenshot of the ThoughtSpot home screenScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the Spotter AI agent that surfaces insights through natural language queriesScreenshot of AI Assist producing SQL in real timeScreenshot of SpotIQ, which offers AI-driven insightsScreenshot of the integration with dbt models and metrics