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
Zoho Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) is a self-service BI and analytics platform that allows users to analyze their business data and create reports and dashboards. It is designed to help users create and share reports quickly, without IT assistance.
$30
per month 2 users
Pricing
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Zoho Analytics
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$14
per month per user
Power BI Premium
$24
per month per user
Basic
$30
0.5M rows, 2 users
Professional
$30
per user per month billed annually
Standard
$60
1M rows, 5 users
Premium
$145
5M rows, 15 users
Enterprise
$575
50M rows, 50 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Zoho Analytics
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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There is a 20% discount for all plans if subscribed yearly. Customers can buy add-on rows and users, in addition to the plans listed above.
Specific data displays are some of the strongest aspects of Microsoft BI when compared to alternate programs. It also does a superior job in compatibility with many programs, especially those from Microsoft. Since my company primarily uses Office 365 and other Microsoft …
The integration functionality was so much slicker with Zoho Analytics. They've made it easy to reach out to 3rd party apps as well as other Zoho apps to bring the data all into one place.
Verified User
Director
Chose Zoho Analytics
I looked at MS Power BI, Tableau, and Google Data Studio. I am also a user of other reporting and analytic tools, primarily Microsoft technologies. Google Data Studio was just counter-intuitive to use, I didn't get very far with it, and Zoho had a lower barrier to entry for …
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.
Zoho Analytics is the best way to consume data created by Zoho products . It's robust and quick build formula libraries and auto generated reports. A data source can be integrated and be ready for consumption within minutes. This gives a well developed baseline for organizing to develop advance analytics. It's mobile dashboards are very intuitive and useful for leaders who are on the move.
Zoho Analytics’ predictive analytics capabilities can help forecast future trends, allowing for proactive planning and risk management.
Performance Monitoring: We can track key performance indicators (KPIs) across departments, such as sales, marketing, finance, and HR. This aids in identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
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.
I'm guessing it's out there somewhere but I really could have used a 'quick start guide' or guided start.
Once I figured it out, it makes sense how to make sure the right data is provided in order to make dashboards quite flexible--- but without examples, I found it quite a challenge
The initial organization of Analytics is NOT intuitive. Once in context, the organizational features make sense, but (at least initially) it would have been most useful if the organization of Analytics reports in Zoho Analytics had saved me a lot of time.
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'd give this an 11 if I could! As our business moves forward we hope to use Zoho Analytics more then we do now. Creating better reports and dashboards for our management team to evaluate the health of our business and to provide more insightful reports for our customers. The possibilities are endless with this 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.
For an end user, Zoho Analytics is pretty easy to use and very easy to access the dashboard. Linking data from multiple sources is very convenient. Multiple people can work on preparing and publishing the dashboards simultaneously, which helps delegate tasks.
ZOHO is a very reliable company/product. We never had any issues with downtime or inaccessibility to our data. Any type of maintenance that they had to perform was clearly communicated and never an issue. We use a lot of external hooks and we've never had any issues with getting ZOHO to communicate with any of those hooks.
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.
ZOHO has obviously invested a lot of time effort and money in to creating a reliable infrastructure with high availability. We've never had any issues with performance and all of our data crunching small to large has always been well within reason. We have come to appreciate the performance of ZOHO and will continue to use it for all of our data needs.
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.
The support team is honestly not that great. At times, it seems as if members of our own team know more about the product than the support team. They must not have a lot of training or the turnaround is quick
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.
If your external data sources are previously organized and correlated (e.g.: in your datawarehouse or database) your implementation will be easier. Of cource some not previously predicted correlation would be necessary to be done during the implementation, but if your organization let it to be all done into Zoho Analytics, it will take more time from your team.
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.
Zoho Analytics has the best UI and user friendly to create reports and dashboard along with features like Zia Assistance that guide in creating reports and dashboard and also help in the forecasting of the data based on the past records.
As far as I know, Zoho Analytics has been able to fulfill every need we've had for it. Our reports have gotten better and more detailed with pretty much every new issue of our magazine. It just keeps getting better, and we keep feeding it more data to digest and present to us.
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.
