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
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
ThoughtSpot
Considered Both Products
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
No answer on this topic
ThoughtSpot
Verified User
Manager
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)
9.9
49 Ratings
19% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.3
89 Ratings
11% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports
9.942 Ratings
6.021 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
9.849 Ratings
8.289 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
9.947 Ratings
7.725 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
9.9
49 Ratings
21% above category average
ThoughtSpot
7.5
91 Ratings
7% below category average
Drill-down analysis
9.944 Ratings
8.590 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
9.849 Ratings
7.290 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9.939 Ratings
5.749 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
9.949 Ratings
8.688 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
9.9
48 Ratings
18% above category average
ThoughtSpot
8.3
84 Ratings
1% above category average
Publish to Web
9.944 Ratings
8.355 Ratings
Publish to PDF
9.944 Ratings
8.678 Ratings
Report Versioning
9.940 Ratings
7.918 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
9.943 Ratings
8.464 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers
9.924 Ratings
8.135 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.