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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)
    9.0
    90%
  • Report Formatting Templates (47)
    8.9
    89%
  • Formatting capabilities (49)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (49)
    8.0
    80%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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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 8.1

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.

9
Avg 8.3

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 8.0

Access Control and Security

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

9
Avg 8.5

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

(934)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(26-50 of 64)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is currently being used across the organization by all departments who have staff interested in tapping the hidden value of their data. It allows users to create their own queries and visualize them without a large time investment to learn the software. Ad hoc reporting is easier to accomplish using MS BI than some of the other data mining software out there.
December 06, 2018

Power BI just works!

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently have limited use of Power BI within our IT and accounting departments for relaying reporting information. We use Power BI to create an efficient interface for our executive team to gain access to vital sales information from our restaurants in a concise, detailed manner as opposed to our traditional Excel spreadsheets. IT uses Power BI to track purchasing as well as within our help desk department.
Zee Gimon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Microsoft Power BI for one of our client's project data management. He has a database of mobile app users who sign up for the premium account and Power BI is used to analyze the data and build a graphical representation of the given data, which is very convenient when you need to create a presentation or something (or simply want to see your data presented visually.)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is currently being used at a program level by project controls to provide project performance data to the project team. Engagement with Power BI allows the different stakeholders for the project to engage with performance data providing them the opportunity to be more responsive to issues and opportunities. It keeps everyone that is a part of the project on course and helps drive collaboration with the team members.
Yemsi Pino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The software is being used as a way to develop different outputs graphics for different analysis and solves problems that I and my collaborators take from field surveys for planning new strategies in order to preserve nature and biodiversity in our territory. The people that use this software are me with the data being stored in Excel sheets.
Gonzalo Angeleri | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is being used as part of a departmental implementation, especially for self-service capabilities. We build our solutions using different Microsoft BI components or tools such as Reporting Services, Integration Services, and Power BI Report Server.
Charles Saulnier | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We build BI solutions on our source systems through Microsoft BI. We use most of SQL Server Enterprise tools, more specifically SSRS, SSIS, SSAS; our end-users mostly work with SS Management Studio, Reporting Services and Excel. Our BI department is for external clients only, we have no internal BI infrastructure.
Megan Juell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company is a Microsoft partner, and we use the Microsoft BI stack throughout the organization. We mainly use it for development and implementation of ETL, database management, analytical processing, and reporting (SSMS, SSIS & SSRS). As consultants, we typically design these processes in our clients' environments (which range from SSMS versions 2008 - 2016), but also do some in-house work for internal product development.
November 07, 2016

Microsoft BI Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is a great tool and it is being used by select departments within my organization for reporting. We run analytics on a variety of metrics and Microsoft BI helps us keep on top of that. The business problems it addresses are our needs for reliable data and reports.
Jasmeet S Babra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI is used in our organization for data analysis and reporting. I used it as a part of marketing live dashboard implementation. It is really a great tool for visualization and customization of views. It's useful in making decisions based on live data and we connect Google Analytics data.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company uses it to analyze data from our various departments (customer service,logistics, manufacturing, etc.) and based on the data, we make necessary adjustments or changes to our business strategies. Typically only the department heads work with Microsoft BI and the results are discussed by upper management, both local and regional.
September 26, 2016

Think hard on your BI goals

Haibo Yang | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have been using a Microsoft BI stack (SSIS SSRS and SSAS) to support our SaaS solution for almost a decade. Over sixty client organisations are now using our SaaS solution to manage their operational risks and related activities. With Microsoft BI, clients can use Report Builder to access our data sources to design, develop, publish and distribute their own reports. On the other hand, we as a service provider can use Visual Studio Data Tool to create and maintain data sources/models. I mostly get called in to design and develop sophisticated dashboards and smart KPI reports (often programming-intensive in nature) for clients when the complexity goes beyond dragging and dropping plus simple VBA expressions. Overall, our clients are happy with the reporting flexibility delivered by Microsoft BI and we ourselves are very positive with the future of this product.
Alexander Lubyansky | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's being used in the Marketing Communications department to help support the marketing campaign efforts of our MarCom staff across our division. The BI was implemented so we could have real time return on investment reporting to analyze how successful campaign efforts had been and use that data to help shape the financial decisions for the remainder of the campaign and also fiscal year. It also helped in data and customer mining to help design campaigns around products that were being replaced with new updates to mine our own data and run successful campaigns targeted specifically to those individuals and companies.

As a result of our efforts though it helped inspire other divisions to implement their own versions of BI for their own reporting and data mining purposes.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have used Microsoft BI for various business requirements, including:
-> Deployment of balance scoreboard comprising of information pertaining to the company’s financial health, production data, scheduled deliveries and other such critical data.
-> Deployment of various MIS reports for Marketing and Production (the highlight being the dashboard, which captures the company’s overall performance in summary format with drilling down option, pending order status – customer wise, order wise, date wise, etc.)
-> Deployment of production dashboard – Summary of production details of the work centers with detailed drill-down abilities.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI was used to implement a data warehouse and a reporting solution for our department and it provides data downstream to multiple lines of business. We currently use SQL Server, SSRS and SSIS 2012 and are currently deploying SSAS while some of the reports are using IBM Cognos.
Ved Mishra | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft Business Intelligence (MS BI) is integral part of our technology eco-system across whole organization. Various tools of the MS BI stack are used to Extract Transform and Load (ETL) data from various data sources and provide and platform to do analytics using pivot tables, pivot charts, power BI, SharePoint, SSRS reports, BI Semantic Model (BISM) reports etc.
February 15, 2016

Simple, snappy, flashy

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Microsoft BI was used short term as a tester for our accounting and promotions department. The idea was to show graphs of our current work and the potential of what we should expect in the coming years. We also like how multiple graphs could be used and displayed at one time. This was something we'd yet to see working so fluidly in previous solutions.
Deanne Damato | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our entire organization, W.B. Mason, uses Microsoft BI for reporting. Putting critical and up to date data in the hands of our sales people and managers making decisions is critical in the changing market place of Office Supplies.
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