Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Yurbi

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.

The Yurbi Poduct is extremely well suited for organizations looking for a mature Business Intelligence and ad-hoc reporting tool. The strength of Yurbi is that it is highly customizable and can work in various environments.

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

• Yurbi allows us to build customized Dashboards for specific users. Once the initial Dashboard is created, the user themselves have permissions to customize the Dashboard to suit their needs. The flexibility is there for a wide set of users.
• Yurbi product is highly customizable. We looked for a Business Intelligence product for quite some time that could be customized to work with different types of data sets. When we started considering Yurbi, it was evident from the beginning that the product could be customized very quickly to work within our environment and our specific data types.
• The Yurbi product stays a step ahead with the changing market being focused more for the tablet and smart phone user population. As our customers first started to use iPADs and iPhones, it was great to see that an upgraded Yurbi product was readily available for use for the iPAD/iPhone set of users.

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

• While the Yurbi Developer tool is highly mature, there have been cases where building specific complex reports within Yurbi required extensive support directly from the vendor (and even some Yurbi product customizations). It would be great if the Yurbi Developer tool could be slightly refreshed to make it easier for more non-technical users to build more complex reports within Yurbi.
• Over years of usage of the Yurbi product with growing set of available reports to run for users, it's easy to get unorganized in terms of being able to find the correct report to run. It's highly adviseable if future releases of Yurbi began offering features to organize all reports a little better within the product (including an audit trail of reports that users typically run to make it easier for them to go back to the right reports).
• We heavily use the SMTP configuration within Yurbi to set up auto-email notifications to specific set of users with requested reports. At times, the SMTP service becomes unavailable and Yurbi product is unable to send these emails to the users. Besides not receiving the email, it's easily evident that the SMTP service connection failed. It would be great if future versions of the Yurbi product would alert the user of the failed SMTP connection on initial Yurbi login so the administrator becomes aware of the issue and can take action to resolve the problem.

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 Yurbi product has been perceived very well by our customers. They have continued to use it for years and the user population has only expanded. Customers love the flexibility and large set of Dashboards and reports that can be made available within the product quickly and efficiently.

Incentivized

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 Yurbi product is incredibly easy to use and very intuitive for the user. The environment is highly customizable to the user's own preferences which is the best part.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Yurbi was very simple to implement and the software prerequisites and server requirements were very basic.

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

Yurbi was overall a better product, highly customizable, more user friendly, and lower priced.

Incentivized

• 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