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Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Overview

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.

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Recent Reviews

Casual User’s POC

8 out of 10
February 08, 2020
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is being used for report generation to monitor ongoing technology projects and business initiatives. We have two users who …
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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

View all 30 features
  • Report sharing and collaboration (49)
    8.9
    89%
  • Report Formatting Templates (47)
    8.9
    89%
  • Formatting capabilities (49)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (49)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Verified User
Administrator in Sales
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees
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Pricing

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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
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

8.6
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

8.7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8.9
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

9
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

9
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

8.5
Avg 7.9

Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding

APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another

8.8
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

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.

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Competitors

Microsoft BI (MSBI) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(937)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
August 07, 2016

It's Excel for Big Data. So easy, so cheap, so fast, and powerful enough most everything.

Alexander Lubyansky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Alexander Lubyansky
Technical Leader for Modeling and Simulation
MITRE (Management Consulting, 5001-10,000 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
Microsoft BI is, and seemingly shall be, the "BI Tool Of Tomorrow" forever. There are few people using it at my organization. In general, whenever I tell technically savvy people in the analytics/consulting space that there's a free visualization tool in Microsoft Excel that's 90-95% as good as Tableau, they are like "What?!" Then, they forget all about it in favor of expensive clunky tools and straight up coding.

Microsoft BI is a many-times-relabelled tool for visualization and lite analytics. It's like super duper Pivot Tables and Pivot Charts that let you work with big data. As an analytics tool per se, it's as good as Excel since it is Excel. I wouldn't do any analytics heavy lifting with it personally, but you can easily do algebra stuff and make derived variables. The real business benefit is visualization. It's just very easy and powerful.
Pros and Cons
  • EASY visualization of business data. Excel is the killer app so anybody remotely good at basic office tools knows how to make PivotTables and PivotCharts. If you don't, it's really easy to learn; give it a try... People think big data visualization is hard but it's not for most business use cases.
  • FAST visualization of business data. There are BI/Analytics tools out there, some of them beginning with the letter S, that are slooow. I do my taxes waiting for them to run basic queries/filters/charts. Microsoft BI (and Tableau, etc.) create compact data models to allow for pretty fast data loading and slicery.
  • FREE or at least REALLY CHEAP visualization of business data. Who has MS Office on their business computer? Oh, everybody. If you don't have Office Pro, pony up for that or get the monthly license. The bigness of data you can run on your own machine is fairly big; don't use cloud if you don't need it. By comparison, who enjoys throwing thousands of dollars away on bloated legacy BI software? Well, too many companies, apparently.
  • More than two dimensions. Yes, I know that 2D is the core of Excel's DNA. However, we're starting to deal with higher-dimensional arrays here in analytics land so better visualization support would be cool.
  • UI weirdness. By default, you are flipping back between regular Excel tabs and super-top-secret BI tabs. You create charts in one place, but look at them in the other. That kind of stuff. I know there are a couple of other ways to interact with Microsoft BI, but please figure out the main way.
  • Better hookups to other analytics tools including Microsoft's. Microsoft BI has a good variety of data connections, and I don't expect it to bloom into a full-fledged analytics tool, but it may be a good idea to keep hammering at connectivity with "hardcore" analytics. In my case, Python stuff.
Likelihood to Recommend

Visualization of business data: it's good, fast, and cheap. What more can you ask? With more specialized visualization needs, use Tableau or write code. For complex scientific visualizations, write code.

It's also so much easier communicating about the tool and its visuals to other people who don't spend their lives analyzing complex data. "It's Excel for Big Data!" is really quite simple.

Alternatives Considered
Looking at the visualization portion of BI, there are three types of tools.
  1. Programming packages. Free and powerful, they let you make any diagram, at the cost of difficulty of use.
  2. Specialist software like Tableau and Microsoft BI. This is the best choice in most cases due to ease of use and quality of output.
  3. More generic software offered by the big IT companies, often part of a BI suite. There's really a lot of variety here. Use this when it fits the workflow and you are already using the relevant software. But, personally, I'd still use the specialist software.
Other Software Used
Microsoft BI (MSBI) Feature Ratings
BI Platform
N/A
N/A
Supported Data Sources
N/A
N/A
BI Standard Reporting (3)
100%
10.0
Pixel Perfect reports
100%
10.0
Customizable dashboards
100%
10.0
Report Formatting Templates
100%
10.0
Ad-hoc Reporting (4)
72.5%
7.3
Drill-down analysis
80%
8.0
Formatting capabilities
60%
6.0
Integration with R or other statistical packages
50%
5.0
Report sharing and collaboration
100%
10.0
Report Output and Scheduling (2)
60%
6.0
Publish to Web
60%
6.0
Publish to PDF
60%
6.0
Data Discovery and Visualization (3)
56.66666666666667%
5.7
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
80%
8.0
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
70%
7.0
Predictive Analytics
20%
2.0
Access Control and Security (2)
50%
5.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
50%
5.0
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
50%
5.0
Mobile Capabilities
N/A
N/A
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
N/A
N/A
Users and Roles
20
That "20" is my best guess. We have over 100 people doing analytics here and I'm not exactly going to do a census. Some of us use Excel in its fancy capacity, but most just use Excel as Excel.
Support Headcount Required
Again, if you don't count IT support for the database side of things, I am having difficulty imagining why one would need support for Power BI any more than one would need support for chewing one's food.
Easy Tasks
  • Familiarity. It's Excel. It's a spreadsheet. Come on.
  • Thinking in matrices (PivotTables) takes a little getting used to, but it's not hard. For people without a good high school math background, it may seem unintuitive.
  • Charts and PivotCharts are fairly easy, but Microsoft has a ways to go to make them less ugly.
Difficult Tasks
  • Data source connections. It's sometimes difficult to replace and update connections.
  • Dropping certain types of fields into the Pivot Table (example: default aggregation type for values).
  • The weird interface. Microsoft tried to have it both ways by using the standard Excel interface for some tasks, and the "Power" interface for others. It's just awkward, cumbersome, and confusing.
Usability
7
It's a good rating for people willing to learn and get used to it, but it's not inherently user friendly, especially to people who are not Excel power users.
November 04, 2014

Microsoft Power BI - Excel Lovers Dream

Sean Warren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Sean Warren
CIO (Chief Information Officer)
Mountain Medical (Hospital & Health Care, 201-500 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Microsoft Power BI across all departments in our company. Power BI is used in reporting and data mining. This allows us to see trends and to identify areas of concern with in our hospital systems that we currently serve. The distribution through Microsoft SharePoint allows for a high adoption rate.
Pros and Cons
  • Ease of use: For end user Microsoft Power BI is incredibly easy to use. Excel is simple for most people. The presentation through SharePoint gives users with any medium the ability to instantly use the dashboards. End users are able to use mobile, local and just about anyway they would choose.
  • High Adoption Rate: We had a very high adoption rate causing many of our users to be incredibly engaged. The adoption of is due to many users already familiar with the tools they grew up on. If you grew up on Excel, then you will instantly feel at home in the tools. The new add ons are rarely a challenge even for novice users.
  • Mapping functions: The mapping functions are one of the cooler features. Power Maps automatically recognizes zip codes and other addresses much like other packages. The one item I really liked was the ability to create a movie file that would play over time showing the growth across a map through the different areas. Saved as a MP4 then blended with music made this function particularly delicious for many of our end users.
  • The Gateway: MS has provided a really cool little trick. The Gateway. I will explain this part later in my review.
  • On the occasion some of the plug ins run unusually slow. I don't know if it's because they run in Silver Light or what. :) The plug ins have locked up more than once (once a week). My installation got so slow that I had to actually reinstall a couple of times over the past year. Is this a show stopper? For me, it was not. There are other features that keep me glued in. The office repair utility makes the re install a snap and if you are a realistic Microsoft fan, then you almost come to expect it.
  • The natural Language selection: We are a MS SQL house and we love MS. We have the skills for high end SQL statements with a full development staff but we still wanted to try the natural language selection tool. To no avail. We tried redoing the data and that did not work either. I'd call this beta still.
  • I would like to see them improve their visualizations. They are Microsoft and can easily compete with some of the visualizations of Micro Strategy, Tableau and Domo. They simply choose not to.
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft has pulled a great trick. The trick is getting you into the pricing for only $20 to $50 dollars a month. They then made it very easy to push to the SharePoint site and keep it updated with free gateway product that will keep your reports live and consistently updated. Now here is a gotcha....IF you use the Data modeling tool (Power Query) for example that is then connected to a large database, you will have no issues. The issues begin at publishing information to SharePoint. There is a size limitation to how large the excel sheet can be. I would point out that we are not making large spread sheets with Pivot tables and millions of rows of data. We are simply connecting through Power Query. The sheet is still very small but the issue is the data model size. This is tapped at a gig on SharePoint. To be considered a true enterprise product, this size limitation will have to be overcome.

There is a (not sure if beta or not) version of some of the power views that can be done in Power BI. These views when rendered locally are wonderful. When they are rendered from the web, they can take a little longer. The part that can be agonizing is the showing views through HTML5. This is almost unworkable when using power maps or maps through power view. The response is so jittery that it is almost unusable.
Alternatives Considered
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.
Likelihood to Renew
8
I will renew because the pain to change, rip out and buy new is simply too much to live through. I am under the assumption that this is still 1.0. Microsoft will better my concerns and I still see them adding features from time to time. They have released new versions of the Power Query, and the Gateway over the past couple of months. They have single evenhandedly turned Excel from the preferred tool of presentation to making Excel Middle ware. Middle Ware? Don't hang up and close the browser yet. Yup, its middle ware. Excel connects to the data, SQL database or the data model, Excel is the tool that passes the information to the real presentation layer. Excel is just a middleware tool that has become more powerful than ever and the platform that Microsoft BI resides upon.

While my review may seem at times critical its the familiarity of the tools (Excel), ease of use, and price that make Microsoft BI the recommended tool for the small to medium size company looking for BI.
Easy Tasks
  • Mapping: Power Maps and Power Views displayed as Maps are awesome. The drill down ability into those is one of my favorites of showing.
  • The ability to add other plugins from the apps store can be very nice as well. There are several of those visualizations that are very nice.
  • Dashboards can be very easy to create but what is elegant? There is a Power BI app for Windows 8 that was compelling enough run VMWARE inside of a Mac. Very slick presentation of the same data as online but not as slick can be.
Difficult Tasks
  • Understanding the license model. As an example we found it very hard figure out exactly what constitutes someone needing a license to even read file from SharePoint and not needing one. There were several occasions that we published what we thought was clean data and the end consumer would not need to have a license only to find out that the user would still be required to have a license. Sounds simple enough to understand but it was not.
  • There are a few features that should translate all the way through Power BI from Excel. As an example Power BI can recognize types of data like Zip codes but even dates in Power View, Power Pivot are not able to be 'Grouped by" by qtr or month. If you are going to group on those you have to add it to the dbase. Yet, Excel will easily group on those in a normal pivot table.
  • HTML5 versions of the presentation on the web have the jitters. very difficult to zoom in our out with any browser or versions of browsers. Stick with the regular version and wait for the HTML 5 version to be updated.
Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions
Yes
Not very well..I don't think this version is very well In a tablet form many of the reports are fine however it works with out many of the interactive features. Static Reports= works great
Dynamic = Not yet Ready. There is no native mobile client that I am aware of for Microsoft Power BI.
Usability
8
Usability is great. This product will make most feel right at home. I feel like this question should be asked from two points of view:

1. Creator of reports, Data Models, Views etc: Most Advanced users will still rate the usability as very high. Its capabilities are still robust. However when compared to other Enterprise Class products it will not do many of the advanced application queries.

2. End user, Consumer: All end users will feel right at home. Many will be able to create connections to already created data models and other external publicly available sources like twitter, Facebook, World Health order etc... These connections are then in turn very very easily available to publish to SharePoint and Power BI.

It took me a while to understand what I think is Microsoft's strategy. This will handle all but the most of robust needs. Much like many American made cars and my favorite Corvette, Microsoft is fast, has it own break downs from time to time but all of these are really to tolerate when the price is considered and the next one up that can out perform it is three to four times as much money makes this an easy one to still recommend.
June 02, 2014

Review by a Microsoft BI consultant

Verified User
Consultant in Other
Information Technology and Services Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
I work for Mariner LLC and they are Microsoft gold certified partners specialized in implementing data warehouse solutions in South East United States. We work with lot of clients in manufacturing, health care, automobile, energy and retail, implementing data warehouse and Business Intelligence solutions in Microsoft tools.
Pros and Cons
  • Low cost and easy to learn and use
  • Microsoft user community is very wide and its easy to identify resources to implement the solution in Microsoft technology
  • With the introduction of Self service (in-memory) platform - Office 365 (Powerpivot, Power view, Power maps and Power query) helps end users do their own ad-hoc reports using these easy to learn and implement tools
  • Parallel data warehouse (with polybase connector to connect to hadoop) will be a suitable replacement for expensive enterprise database tools like Teradata and Oracle
  • Power Pivot is a very good tool to do self service BI but there is no direct way to implement row based security to the model. There has to be a mechanism where the owner of the book can lock the model within the book to be read only or hide the model so that other users will only see the reports and not the underlying data model
  • Many to many functionality is simple in multi dimensional cubes but there is no direct and efficient way available in SSAS Tabular model and Power Pivot
  • Even though Power Pivot is a easy to use and fast to implement BI solution, without proper training, end users can't utilize all the functionality of Power Pivot and common mistakes and misunderstandings will be expensive in long run
Likelihood to Recommend
Power Pivot can be used to do proof of concept very quickly. This POC can then be easily upgraded to an actual enterprise BI cube and a BI solution. This feature is not available in any other existing BI tools.
Return on Investment
  • Business users easily learned self service BI with training and what to do and what not to do with self service BI
  • Learning curve for Powerpivot and other office 365 tools for IT team who already knew about data warehousing concepts is steep
Alternatives Considered
None
Likelihood to Renew
10
Low Cost and catching up to the market expectations
Implementation Details / Implementation Partner
  • Professional services company
Mariner LLC
Implementation Phases
Yes
There are 2 phases implemented
Its based on subject area and the requirement of the business users
Change Management Lessons
Change management was minimal
The Organization had an agreement for a common vision to implement Business Intelligence to have more insights to data. Leadership team is in favor of the change and they are very much interested in implementing Business Intelligence
Implementation Issues
  • Transitioning to a new tool - From SSRS reports (with sql server tables as source) to power view and power maps (using SSAS cubes)
Implementation Rating
10
Yes.
Support Rating
7
Quick response. Lots of blogs and support forums are there to get the answer myself
Exceptional Examples of Microsoft BI (MSBI) Support
SSAS 2012 tabular cube got corrupted due to a power outage. Microsoft quickly jumped in to fix the problem (power outage happened when the cube was processsing) and gave a solution why it has corrupted
Easy Tasks
  • Integrating various data sources in power pivot
  • Data cleansing and data mashups in Power query
  • Easy visualizations in Power view
Difficult Tasks
  • From an end user perspective, writing complex measures and debugging the errors in power pivot data refresh when excel source(with vlookups) is used
Mobile Interface Availability and Impressions
Yes
Sharepoint 2013 (PPS, SSRS from 2012 onwards - integrated mode, excel services) works very good
Usability
9
Easy to use. Good User Interface and visualizations
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