Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Ziflow

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.

Incentivized

We work with a lot of cross functional teams, so it is nice to have them review things on their own and provide feedback all in the one place for our team to review. It helps cut back on meetings and emails full of feedback that gets lost. This is especially helpful when we are working on our catalogs. We do reviews on Ziflow all the way from rough layouts to proofreading.

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

• Simple and user friendly interface with little if no learning curve.
• Accurate and specific change requests are especially enhanced when using the markup tools.
• Nice to be able to assign who the decision maker is and also be able to change project participants easily, like when someone goes on holiday or sick leave.
• SOCD (sent, opened, comment, decision) progress indicators provide an awesome 'at a glance' view of project participants activity.
• Email notifications and integration with ASANA is brilliant.

Incentivized

• 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

• Comments with instances that span multiple pages force you to zoom out, which can be rough on multi-page proofs. We end up making a comment on each instance for ease of review.
• Maybe it is in there, but I would love to be able to upload a new version and review/make comments before any of the other reviewers can see it—to double-check for errors. Maybe there is a verification stage first before releasing it to the other reviewers.

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.

Ziflow is easy to use, efficient and now is also part of our daily lives. Hence, the teams are already adapted to the tool and willing to work with it. The features are according to all what was expected and we had a great experience until the moment with the tool

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 tool is easy to use for digital oriented people. For the ones not used to this kind of environment, it could look a bit complicated at the beginning, but following the instructions and tutorials and performing it once makes you get a grip of it in just one use.

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.

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.

Incentivized

The ZIflow support team has always been very responsive to my questions, issues and other problems. The good thing is I have never had to use their support team all that much because Ziflow has been for the most part trouble free. If it had been error prone, we would have dropped it long ago.

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.

They were friendly and took the time to go through everything, especially relating to how we would use the system.

Incentivized

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.

It was seemless! Things got instantly better when we started using Ziflow!

Incentivized

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

I found Ziflow to be much better than PageProof in several ways. The tools available for making comments and edits are more intuitive and there is a greater variety of tools and the version control features worked much better as well. Also their customer service was far better when it was necessary to interact with the company

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

• Improved efficiency and time saved in making proofs and adding people to proofs with staging and template features.
• Robust proofreading features for reviewers like comparing previous versions.
• In my experience, customer service is quick to help with issues or outages (which aren't often).

Incentivized