MSBI : a new boom in the digital world!
I use MSBI specifically for data generation and data analytics. It has helped me to create a data way more simpler and easy to understand. …
Starting at $9.99 per user/per month
View PricingOverview
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
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.
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Report sharing and collaboration (49)8.989%
- Report Formatting Templates (47)8.989%
- Formatting capabilities (49)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (49)8.080%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Power BI Pro
$9.99
Cloud
per user/per month
Power BI Premium
4,995
Cloud
per month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://powerbi.microsoft.com/pricing
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
Return to navigation
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Microsoft BI (MSBI)?
Microsoft BI (MSBI) benefits from the ubiquity of SQL server and the set of tools built around the database, including an ETL layer, master data management, data cleansing, report and reporting.
The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of visualization tools like Tableau or Qlik. Excel has historically been the platform visualization tool. Power BI for Office 365 has done much to improve the discovery and visualization capabilities of Excel.
Microsoft now offers Power BI cloud as the visualization platform with geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL along with charting and other data visualizations that can be uploaded and shared through the Power BI service.
The Power BI platform also provides live access to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instances, and self-service access to third-party cloud sources including Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and GitHub. Mobility is supported through a native iPad app, an iPhone app.
This new platform is viewed by Microsoft as a visualization layer sitting on top of their earlier generation of installed SQL-based technology.
The reporting engine is SQL Server Reporting Services which does not have the visualization capabilities of visualization tools like Tableau or Qlik. Excel has historically been the platform visualization tool. Power BI for Office 365 has done much to improve the discovery and visualization capabilities of Excel.
Microsoft now offers Power BI cloud as the visualization platform with geospatial 3D, natural-language query generation, and self-service ETL along with charting and other data visualizations that can be uploaded and shared through the Power BI service.
The Power BI platform also provides live access to on-premises Microsoft SQL Server instances, and self-service access to third-party cloud sources including Salesforce, Marketo, Zendesk, and GitHub. Mobility is supported through a native iPad app, an iPhone app.
This new platform is viewed by Microsoft as a visualization layer sitting on top of their earlier generation of installed SQL-based technology.
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Competitors
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Oracle Analytics Server and Spoom are common alternatives for Microsoft BI (MSBI).
Reviewers rate Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile highest, with a score of 9.9.
The most common users of Microsoft BI (MSBI) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(937)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(51-62 of 62)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 05, 2014
Tools and Integration
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
OBIEE, Cognos, and Business Objects. Microsoft BI provided ETL, basic reporting, and cubes for analytics at a reasonable price.
November 04, 2014
Microsoft Power BI - Excel Lovers Dream
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft is a distant me too in a world that is crowded and drowning in BI Me too products. Visualizations 5/10. Micro Strategy, ClickView, Domo, BOBJ etc will kill this product. The issue is cost and speed to implementation. The cost is far less than any of the previously mentioned items. The implementation time could be a fraction of those products. The implementation of this product can be as simple as connecting Excel to the database (Create the relationships that you can do in the dbase or the query in Excel) and pushing to the Cloud. From the cloud based app you simply launch the gateway. The gateway is a breeze for anyone to connect with. The gateway only needs path back and its a breeze. No IT guys needed, no professional services, no firewalls or routing tables to configure. Just plug and play. This feature alone is the key product differentiation in my review. We already had the tables developed and ETL be damned, they all push from the MS-SQL dbase directly to cloud. Is this going to be big and fast in an environment with Data Universe's, API's to other products, and true Enterprise class features. I dont think so. Is it good enough for most small to medium companies or departments? Yes.
November 04, 2014
Best TCO but many layers to the overall solution
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Tableau is a very feature rich tool, but it is also a pricey tool relative to Microsoft BI. Tableau's visualizations are very nice, but those features don't necessarily give us a strategic advantage or allow us get our work done any quicker. The monthly fee that you pay for PowerBI and Office 365 is a tiny fraction of the Tableau solution.
November 04, 2014
Best TCO of any comprehensive database and analytics platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
September 25, 2014
Microsoft - Your Old Trusted Friend?
I have been using the open source open standards BI tool 'Pentaho' before moving into the Microsoft space and I must admit I was surprised how much more difficult it is to do development in Microsoft. Having said that the cubes (SSAS) and reporting (SSRS) side does seem more robust and not all that difficult to get your head around. Where Microsoft is lacking in comparison with Pentaho is the ETL tool. SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) is much more difficult to learn than Pentaho Data Integration (PDI) and even when you know exactly what you are doing it still takes more steps to get the same job done. Regarding the performance it seems that since a lot of the ETL logic gets put onto the database (using SQL statements) it won't make much of a difference which tool you use.
September 14, 2014
Microsoft BI - A good all around suite of products for the traditional data environment
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Tableau Desktop,Tableau Server,Crystal Reports,SAP Business Objects
-Tableau is clearly more cutting edge when it comes to data visualization and connecting to multiple data sources (support for MongoDB, Hadoop, etc).
-Assuming your data is not that sophisticated, Microsoft BI is a great product. I would say its a good "all around" BI tool. It does a good job in building operational reports. The reports run very fast on the report server. Most IT folks and alot of business folks can get comfortable with this product and build their own reports. You can create a semantic layer for the business users to pull their own data from (and its drag and drop).
-Microsoft BI pretty much smokes Crystal Reports, SAP Business Objects and even IBM Cognos (I have limited experience with Cognos but from what I saw, it was pretty horrible to use). When I say "smokes" I mean that Crystal Reports, SAP Business Objects IBM Cognos are like using Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft BI is like using Firefox 2013. Why would you bother using such old products that haven't kept up with the needs of today's analysts? It's not so much about functionality as it is about UI design and a certain level of intuitiveness.
-Assuming your data is not that sophisticated, Microsoft BI is a great product. I would say its a good "all around" BI tool. It does a good job in building operational reports. The reports run very fast on the report server. Most IT folks and alot of business folks can get comfortable with this product and build their own reports. You can create a semantic layer for the business users to pull their own data from (and its drag and drop).
-Microsoft BI pretty much smokes Crystal Reports, SAP Business Objects and even IBM Cognos (I have limited experience with Cognos but from what I saw, it was pretty horrible to use). When I say "smokes" I mean that Crystal Reports, SAP Business Objects IBM Cognos are like using Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft BI is like using Firefox 2013. Why would you bother using such old products that haven't kept up with the needs of today's analysts? It's not so much about functionality as it is about UI design and a certain level of intuitiveness.
September 12, 2014
Useful but reporting could be more sexy...
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microsoft BI's powerful integration tool makes it easy to adapt to a particular context with many heterogene sources (including external files from Access, Excel or csv).
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The Microsoft BI tool both from an integration and cost / investment standpoint makes perfect sense as to why we chose the Microsoft BI tool.
June 02, 2014
Review by a Microsoft BI consultant
May 30, 2014
Microsoft BI- Delivering Power
I have used many BI tools, and while they all serve a purpose, none of them can compete as strongly across as many metrics as Microsoft.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Microsoft BI vs SAP Business Objects
If I could have the best-in-breed approach, I would use PDW as the back-end data store along with SSAS and SSIS. Then I would keep using Crystal Reports (our users were trained in CR already) for our reporting tool since it is superior to Report Builder. We found SSIS to be a much better fit with PDW than SAP's Data Services. As for the dashboards, Power View is a lean and quick tool but doesn't offer the depth of SAP's Dashboards (Xcelsius) or Design Studio. However, at the time of our purchase SAP Design Studio did not connect to SQL Server databases, only SAP HANA and SAP BW.
September 06, 2013
Build a highly automated and flexible BI solution for your organization!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Microstrategy - I went with Microsoft BI because of features, usability, integration capabilities, performance, availability of talent, cost, and end-user (self-service) capabilities.