Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance and security.
$168
per year per user
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.
$0
Sisense
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Sisense is a BI software and analytics platform. With what the vendor calls their In-Chip™ and Single Stack™ technologies, users have access to a comprehensive tool to analyze and visualize large, disparate data sets without IT resources.
N/A
Pricing
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sisense
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$14
per month (billed annually) per user
Power BI Premium
$24
per month (billed annually) per user
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sisense
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Power BI Desktop is the data exploration and report authoring experience for Power BI, and is available as a free download.
—
Must contact sales team for pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sisense
Considered Multiple Products
Microsoft Power BI
Verified User
Professional
Chose Microsoft Power BI
Cost-effective but has a lot of features to offer. The perfect tool to build reports and dashboards with a large amount of data and complex data modeling. End users do not require much knowledge to get used to the tool. Regular updates from Microsoft to add new features and has …
We selected Microsoft Power BI because it was the easiest to integrate with our primary systems, allowed us to embed reports for our partners, allowed us to host our data and some reports on premise. It also provided the shortest route to production deployment allowing us to …
Microsoft BI tool does a better job than most of the other software. The reason is excellent visualizations and its capability to connect with various other software and data sources. Tableau does a better job when it comes to tutorials and being more user-friendly. Also …
prior to Visual Studio Code, I was using Sublime Text, which was not the most effective in terms of third-party libraries and complex debugging, so I switched to Visual Studio Code where I got a positive as a developer. it is having all the features and third-party libraries to …
Verified User
Contributor
Chose Microsoft Visual Studio Code
It has everything other editors are offering but you will find so many additions. Sometimes you don't think you need a feature until you start using it and that's the case with VS Code. So many things will pop up and make your life easier. Just because you're used to other …
Each tool has strengths, but Sisense stands out for its ease of use, scalability, and robust data integration. We chose Sisense for its balance of robust functionality and ease of use. We are happy that it can handle complex data integrations that aligned perfectly with our …
Sisense truly stacks up against Power BI, Domo or Tableau as one of the most accurate data analysis applications that offers an intuitive approach to data exploration. You can use its web-based interface to tap the expertise of your data analytics team. They can build and share …
Sisense does very well against most of the tools in the market. We chose this tool because of its great visualizations and easy to deploy procedures. The reports are very easy to generate and distribute them across departments and organization. It provides a great interface to …
Before purchasing Sisense and began recommending it as a solution to our clients, we tested four other BI visualization tools. All four of these ranked high on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. We researched Domo, Looker, MS Power BI and Tableau. Looker could be a better solution if …
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Sisense
I've used a few different analytical engines over the last few years and none have the efficient ability as both a data manager and a dashboarding tool - usually, other platforms excel in one area or another. To expand further, tools that succeed in data management and …
Sisense can't compare to any tool for the ease of user, intuitive interface and "time to data". I gave been working with both large enterprise and small SMB's using Sisense, and it is amazing to see how small companies quickly learn how to use it and how practical and efficient …
Features
Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
Sisense
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.3
197 Ratings
1% above category average
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
-
Ratings
Sisense
9.7
47 Ratings
17% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
8.3168 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.037 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
8.7196 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.047 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
8.0179 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.033 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.0
195 Ratings
0% below category average
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
-
Ratings
Sisense
8.8
47 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis
8.3192 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.047 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
7.8192 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.047 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7.4143 Ratings
00 Ratings
9.027 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
8.4190 Ratings
00 Ratings
7.33 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft Power BI
8.0
188 Ratings
3% below category average
Microsoft Visual Studio Code
-
Ratings
Sisense
10.0
46 Ratings
19% above category average
Publish to Web
8.3178 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.036 Ratings
Publish to PDF
8.0173 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.046 Ratings
Report Versioning
7.7145 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.024 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
8.3148 Ratings
00 Ratings
10.039 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers
7.9111 Ratings
00 Ratings
00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Has significantly improved collation of data and visualisation especially with business across Europe. Has given me the ability to see the Site availability at the click of a button to see which Site is in the "money" and seize opportunities based on Market data
As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
I believe Sisense is perfectly suited for any organization of any size that have access to the proper resources, as the tool is very expensive. The data connectors come in all shapes and sizes out of the box, which allows a great deal of data control within the ElastiCubes. Additionally, while the platform only runs on Windows platforms, the web application can be accessed on any client: mobile, Apple, Windows, etc. This allows a much more flexible user experience, resulting in data and dashboards reaching further than any other tool.
Options for data source connections are immense. Not just which sources, but your options for *how* the data is brought in.
Constant updates (this is both good and bad at times).
User friendliness. I can get the data connections set up and draft some quick visuals, then release to the target audience and let them expand on it how they want to.
The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these
The usability of the application on mobile devices needs some improvement, especially navigation and filtering.
Dashboards that are created by multiple users can be a bit of a hassle to share by Admins.
If you need to embed dashboards into your website, you are require to buy a license separate from the user and platform license. This is a norm on most BI visualization tools, but Sisense can seem a bit on the high side, cost-wide.
Microsoft Power BI is an excellent and scalable tool. It has a learning curve, but once you get past that, the sky is the limit and you can build from the most simple to the most complex dashboards. I have built everything from simple reports with only a few data points to complex reports with many pages and advanced filtering.
Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
I think the business and myself as a user has come to rely on SiSense as a dashboarding and quick ad-hoc reporting tool. I am hoping to integrate SiSense dashboards into more parts of the business in the future. We have reduced our report turn-around time for the most part from hours/days to minutes and in some cases almost the speed of thought. Reports are also easier on the eye and more easily distributed. I would also like to say that the support and professionalism from the SiSense team has been excellent.
Automating reporting has reduced manual data processing by 50-70%, freeing up analysts for higher-value tasks. A finance team that previously spent 20+ hours per week on Excel-based reports now does it in minutes with Microsoft Power BI's automated Real-time dashboards have shortened decision cycles by 30-40%, enabling leadership to react quickly to sales trends, operational bottlenecks, and customer behavior.
Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.
New V5 is ground floor of an exciting collection of possibilities. Weekly Sisense developers come up with new functionality that they share with us in their forums. The move to HTML5 has been pleasing in that widgets auto size themselves into appropriate forms in the board but everyone of them can be popped out to full page size to be looked at in more detail
Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.
There are very few situations when there is unexpected downtime. Mostly during development, new dashboard implementation and during upgrades. other then that there were very few crashes.
Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).
SiSense is usually performing better then other solutions even if going for complex reports/dashboards(of course within reasonable frames). I haven't noticed any bad influence on other systems, usually if something happens it stays within SiSense.
It is a fantastic tool, you can do almost everything related with data and reports, it is a perfect substitutive of Power Point and Excel with a high evolution and flexibility, and also it is very friendly and easy to share. I think all companies should have Power BI (or other BI tool) in their software package and if they are in the MS Suite, for sure Power BI should be the one due to all the benefits of the MS ecosystem.
Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
SiSense's support ninjas are very knowledgeable and are exceptionally responsive. So far, all of the issues we ran into were resolved within minimum time. My sense of dealing with the support staff at SiSense is that they are very focused on not just answering your immediate question, but also to delve into the cause of the matter.
Easy and free training that allowed us quickly understand basics in SiSense and start using them. More advanced features requires some browsing through SiSense forums, but there is always support to help, and SiSense support is one of the best whith which I worked so far.
Many examples, videos and scenarios which you try on your own right away. This combined with in-person training gives you enough to utilize most of SiSense's power.
Microsoft Power BI is free. If I didn't want to create a custom platform (i.e. my organization insisted on an existing platform that I *had* to use), I'd use Microsoft Power BI. For any start-up or SMB, I'd just use Claude & Grok to build it quickly, also for free. Would not pay for Tableau or Sigma anymore. Not worth it at all.
Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.
1) Easy to use, really, there is nothing too much to say. The set up is easy and not confusing. You can use it internally or externally.
2) Customer Service, having spoken to various product reps from similar industry. Sisense rep provides you with the best support to get started, and it is really appreciated.
It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.
