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
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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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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%
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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
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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).
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Reviews and Ratings
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Reviews
(51-73 of 73)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 30, 2015
Why I Love Microsoft BI.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- User Friendly
- Fast
- Reliable
- Improve Data Visualization
- One Stop Shopping: Single solution provider provides tight integration between data storage, data manipulation, data processing and presentation. Instead of buying an RDBMS from one provider, data processing tools from another vendor, and presentation tools from yet another, the entire application stack is provided by Microsoft.
- Value: Compared to other RDBMS vendors, Microsoft BI tools are more cost-effective because all the tools needed are included in the purchase of Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint and Office. SQL Server even has a Business Intelligence Edition!
- Performance: The SQL Server RDBMS is a top-tier data management solution. Ancillary tools like Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS), Reporting Services (SSRS), PerformancePoint are mature, full featured and include lots of performance monitoring and high availability options. The newer Power BI tools have made tremendous strides in stability and usability since their introduction last year.
- HDInsight and Azure BLOB storage offer a new paradigm for storing and querying data sets of all sizes. Flat files are stored in inexpensive storage, and HDInsight Hive allows "schema over file" table structures and near-ANSI SQL queries. This provides an inexpensive, very fast way to process data from web logs, large call center logs, and other large data volume data sets without importing into a database. Once the processing is complete, the HDInsight cluster (up to 64 nodes) is dropped, leaving the data intact.
- Azure Hybrid Scenarios: Microsoft is rapidly migrating their business offerings to Azure. Business Intelligence is no exception.
- Many new features in SQL Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2014 are designed to allow seamless management of both on-premise and cloud-based data,From Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS) options like virtual servers for development and test to Power BI for Office 365 sites that revolutionize how data is shared and accessed, Microsoft is making significant investments in the next generation of cloud-based solutions.
- Power BI maturity: Power BI is a combination of add-ons for Microsoft Excel and a special Office365 hosting site. However, the primary presentation tool, Power View, has a long way to go to catch up with such competitors as Tableau and even Microsoft's current analytics platform, PerformancePoint. To address these concerns, Power BI releases are being scheduled out-of-band from normal version upgrades in order to address requirements of the user community.
- Office 365: There are currently size limitations, like a 250GB max for PowerPivot worksheets, which might cause issues with organizations who want to utilize very large data sets with Power BI.
- Messaging: Some of the marketing and best practices around the new cloud-based solutions are unclear, making it difficult for someone who doesn't work in the BI world to understand the benefits and the architecture for such solutions.
- Multiple data manipulation languages: Currently there are four or five distinct query languages in the Microsoft BI stack: T-SQL for SQL Server, MDX and DAX for Analysis Services, and the Power Query Formula Language for Power Query. In Integration Services, there is yet another language used in some of the tasks. That seems to be a lot to keep abreast of!
March 10, 2015
Microsoft BI platform review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Easy development tools with ability to support large data.
- Features of the predictive analytics are not the best in the industry yet.
February 04, 2015
Why is Microsoft BI Right for Me?
- SSIS is by far the easiest and most efficient ETL (Extract, Transform & Load) tool available, after trying many different tools over the years there is no tool that is more flexible and easier to develop solutions with. What takes days/weeks or longer to setup in other tools can be done in at least half the time and perform better.
- SSRS is one of the best web reporting tools available for companies of any size that doesn't require you to re-architect your entire existing database structure. SSRS can connect to all of the major databases and work with data from multiple of them all in the same report. For web reporting that needs to be up and running fast, but be secure and easy to develop on there is no better tool available today.
- SSAS is for more in depth analysis of your data and it has the same capabilities as all other Microsoft tools to connect to multiple data sources and present the data to the user in standardized format. Most users will love that they can access so much of the companies data in Excel using the PivotTables that they probably already use today, but now you are controlling the data and know that it is the correct data. With the new Tabular capabilities in SQL Server 2012 and up it allows end users to help build the initial version of these complex data structures which can then be migrated over to IT to add security, automation and quality control to the final solution.
- The development tools for Microsoft BI in SQL Server 2012 and up are in a bit of flux at the moment. Initially with SQL Server 2012 they were all fully integrated and available with the installer, but now they have moved to it being a separate web download that you have know which version you need to get it working correctly with the version of SQL Server you are working on. Thankfully all of these tools still use Visual Studio as the starting point, but it would be nice to see the tools better integrated going forward and still able to be updated on a regular basis.
- SSRS has not seen any major updates in the last couple of versions of SQL Server and it could really benefit from some of the new advancements that Microsoft has made with the Power BI line of products that are only available if you use the cloud based Office 365 service. It would be really nice to see some of the features that are available in Power BI added to SSRS to make it a more complete web based reporting tool and more accessible to end users as well as IT.
February 03, 2015
Microsoft BI -- Say GoodBI to the Competition for the Moment.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Connecting andJoining Multiple Data Sources Together - Multi-Dimensional SSAS
- Usability in Report Creation for Business Analysts (Excel via Analysis Services specifically), Executives (Performance Point and Power BI) and Power Users (Report Builder)
- Collaboration (via SharePoint only, before the release of Power BI Designer)
- Speed of Analysis - Specifically when leveraging SSAS on databases up to 5 TB
- Speed of ETL processing - Multiple Parallel Sequential Jobs with SSIS/DTS
- Parallel Sequential job Processing within the SSIS GUI, not using DTS
- More Options for non-SharePoint portal Integration
- Reporting Services performance browser rendering time for reports
November 13, 2014
Thoughts on MS BI
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Overall it is a robust BI platform that is not difficult for a technically-oriented person to learn and use.
- I am a huge fan of Analysis Services and actively try to find ways to get data into cubes for reporting. While learning MDX may be one of the more difficult aspects of MS BI, it is powerful and anyone who has prior experience using T-SQL alone to build complex reports can appreciate its power.
- I have been disappointed in how all the front-end delivery tools have been centered around Excel and SharePoint. I understand it from a business sense but I much preferred the ProClarity interface as a stand-alone ad-hoc reporting tool. Many end-users are intimidated by merely mentioning pivot tables and therefore do not even try to create their own queries.
November 06, 2014
Microsoft BI entering 21st century for its analytical capabilities
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Create relationships between data sources
- Automatic updates when new data are fetched
- Ease of use, especially for non-technical people like me.
November 05, 2014
Tools and Integration
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- ETL and Cube reporting through Excel are the two main functions where Microsoft BI excels.
- Without Sharepoint, web reporting is not very robust. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) provides limited functionality but, without Sharepoint integration, Microsoft BI doesn't match up well against other products.
November 04, 2014
Microsoft Power BI - Excel Lovers Dream
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- 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.
November 04, 2014
Best TCO but many layers to the overall solution
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Microsoft's BI stack is a set of widely implemented products used in various capacities including operational reporting, ETL, and self service BI. This product stack has been successfully implemented in a wide range of verticals including health care, insurance, and banking.
- Power BI is an agile and low cost solution to an organization's analytics needs. Power BI is tightly coupled with other Microsoft products, enabling companies to have a single firm wide solution with a single vendor.
- If you want a straight forward and simple BI solution, there are better products for this. To take full advantage of Microsoft BI, you also need SharePoint, SQL Server, and Microsoft Excel/Office. Other software vendors offer BI solutions that consist of only a single software product, but if you are looking only to create fancy dashboards, this is not for you. This is a longer term strategic solution. Features are a bit slim now in Power BI, but expect that to change in future releases.
November 04, 2014
Best TCO of any comprehensive database and analytics platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The Microsoft Business Intelligence stack has come a very long way since its inception. For value and TCO there's really no comparison. Where other vendors charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for database systems, ETL tools, MDM solutions, reporting portals, etc. Microsoft ties all this functionality and more together for the price of just one of those components. Developers that know the toolset well are readily available worldwide and at a lower cost than those with expertise in competing platforms. In partnership with both Dell and HP, Microsoft has recommended reference architectures running on commodity hardware to create highly performant, highly available warehousing and OLTP systems. The SharePoint layer adds a rich user interface and collaboration platform for analytics, data discovery, reporting (both ad-hoc and scheduled) and data driven subscriptions.
- The Microsoft platform - today - comes up short in cross-platform delivery. While efforts are being made to port the Power BI tools to HTML5, so far these tools are only available with this rendering engine in the online (O365) version of the platform. Silverlight is a dying technology, and it can be frustrating to explain the design and interop limitations of the end user facing dashboard tools. For true styled enterprise dashboarding where the look and feel of the artifacts is important (external audiences), it's often necessary to turn to a Microsoft partner tool such as Dundas to augment the stack. These problems will resolve themselves over time, but right now Microsoft comes up short in this area.
- The MDM solution in the Microsoft toolset, Master Data Services, is effectively a blank slate. This is both a strength and a weakness, in that you can model any data domain imaginable without being pushed in a particular direction but having some basic customer or other key domains available either via Codeplex or otherwise would be helpful. Additionally, record lineage isn't handled well OOTB in MDS and this key function shouldn't require a custom implementation.
September 25, 2014
Microsoft - Your Old Trusted Friend?
- Users might complain about products and technologies but somehow it seems Microsoft is an accepted standard. The brand is very strong, people just don't question it and forgive 'bugs' more readily than they might with other products.
- It is an easy choice to buy a Microsoft product - people are less likely to challenge this decision. Again, simply due to strong brand recognition users often feel comfortable with the tools.
- SQL Server Data Integration (also knows as SSIS) seems to provide most functionality you would expect from an ETL tool. However, when you start using it you quickly find out that most transformations perform slower than equivalent functionality when coded directly in SQL. So you go ahead with creating joins, using case statements and data type conversions directly in SQL input statements and potentially end up with a huge piece of code that performs nicely but is hardly maintainable in the future.
- The development environment takes quite a while to get used to. Once you are all set up and doing your development work it is all fine but if you accidentally close some window or 'pane' just figuring out how to get it back can take quite some time.
September 19, 2014
Microsoft BI
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Quite nice ETL options in SSIS that enable a lot of flexibility.
- Powerful user rights management.
- Ease of use - this tool is difficult to use.
- Native visualization tool - Excel is too unstable.
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
- The interfaces of the products are familiar to most people that currently use Microsoft products so its comfortable in that respect
- Creating a report is easy to do with drag/drop functionality. You also have alot of dropdowns. You can use formulas the same way you do in Excel. They have "expressions" which are like formulas with a mix of SQL.
- Publishing a report to the server is simple as well. You go to the server and upload the file from your file directory.
- Setting up subscriptions is simple as well. Anyone can do it with minimal knowledge. Its sort of like creating a recurring calendar event.
- The hierarchy within SSRS is intuitive. A Project is the top level item. You can add as many reports as you want to a project. Similar to any other IDE where you keep all your files in one project (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSP, Servlet) except in the case of SSRS its all reports.
- Whether you choose to use 2008 or 2012 the interface is layed pretty much the same. So if you start of in 2008 and then upgrade, you dont have to re-learn anything. Their are slight differences in the two versions but it wont hinder your ability to build a report.
- Its not a web based application yet. So you have to install the client application on your local machine. In addition, you pretty much have to install a the full SSMS package. Its a heavy weighted suite of products
- Compared to Tableau you are limited in your dashboard building ability. In SSRS you have to build a master report along with a subreport where these two items have to have a key that links them together. From there you can break up the screen into multiple quadratics with your visualization.
- If someone wants to view the report on their iPad, you have to make sure that the subscription for their report is in PDF or CSV format. If its in Excel and they dont have Excel on their iPad, they cant view it. If its in CSV, I believe the report will open up in the iPads native spreadsheet app.
- When you are stuck while building a report, the forums for Microsoft pretty much suck. Their technical articles suck also. Microsoft support is pretty much non-existent.
September 12, 2014
Useful but reporting could be more sexy...
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Integration process in IT Architecture
- Ability to adapt with process
- Graphical standard reporting
- Using on premise, could be great to use it in the cloud
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Easy to use and create KPI's with Dashboards for a wide user base
- Pulling data from multiple sources via Excel
- Easily supportive
- Low cost to maintain
- More end user friendly Dashboard designer.
June 02, 2014
Review by a Microsoft BI consultant
- 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
May 30, 2014
Microsoft BI- Delivering Power
- Microsoft BI is very easy to use and provides a number of interfaces that allow developers to build out solutions in the manner that is easiest for them. Development can be done nearly entirely through GUI interfaces, or you can do advanced programming and application integration.
- Microsoft BI provides enterprise class Business Intelligence for a fraction of the price of their competitors while at the same time making it far easier to manage the entire platform.
- Microsoft BI is already integrated with your entire Office suite and easily integrates with SharePoint, SQL, all Microsoft Products, as well as any third party software or data you use.
- The latest versions of Microsoft BI has addressed nearly all of my complaints. The only remaining item would be the ability to uniformly color coordinate metrics across the entire reporting platform. Example, automatically Profit should be Green while Loss should be Red in any chart. Or Wisconsin should be Green and Minnesota should be Purple. This is VERY minor to me, but to some customers this can be a bigger deal.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The parallel data warehouse is a massive storage appliance with exceptional speed.
- The platform is all Microsoft and integrates well with all other Microsoft products and infrastructure.
- Microsoft's support of the product has been outstanding.
- Power View is a quick and easy tool to use for developing dynamic dashboards but lacks some very basic features. The color scheme and styles are applied across all views with no method for choosing which colors apply to certain objects. Users cannot rename visual components, you must make sure you cube field have the names you intend end users to see.
- Report Builder allows for quite a bit of customization but we found it be missing some the features that make other application like Crystal Reports so easy to use. Simple features such as moving columns within a table can be a bit frustrating. Formatting text and writing formulas (expressions) is easier in Crystal Reports.
- Parallel Data Warehouse is not a true SQL Server 2012 database and is missing much of the SQL Server 2012 feature set.
October 24, 2013
MS BI Suite Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is by far the best OLAP tool on the market today. It helps businesses to aggregate data and analyze historical trends.
- SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has a relatively difficult deployment mechanism. More mature ETL systems like Informatica have a right-click and deploy packages feature. SSIS does not have that out-of-the-box unless you install some 3rd party tools. Also the whole Deployment Manifest thing is a real pain…
October 20, 2013
Microsoft BI
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Great BI solution that is low cost.
- Integrates very well with other Microsoft Office tools such as Excel so end users do not need extensive training on a new reporting tool.
- No end user controlled reporting. An analyst with SQL coding knowledge needs to program each report.
October 08, 2013
MS BI - Good and getting better
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Integration is straightforward to a variety of platforms using SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS).
- SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is fast, flexible and extensive.
- Native integration with Excel & Sharepoint provide a rich and familiar user interface for adoption.
- SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not as extensive as it should or could be.
- PerformancePoint has some great features such as the decomposition tree (for root cause analysis), but it is way too hard to deploy.
September 06, 2013
Build a highly automated and flexible BI solution for your organization!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Analysis Services by far outperforms in-memory ROLAP type systems - this allows for very fast ad-hoc drill-down and discovery of huge data sets. Don't believe otherwise - I can assure you it is true. Of course, you have to know what you are doing on the data modeling side in order to get there.
- Analysis Services's ability to integrate with Reporting Services and Microsoft Excel is extremely attractive to business users, especially analysts who are very familiar with the powerful analysis tools already in Excel. The performance of reports built on Analysis Services is really a stand-out feature as well.
- Integration Services is hands-down the most flexible and powerful ETL tool you have ever used. Just try it - there is no one else even close. You will be able to pull data from anywhere, push data to anywhere, and build just about any workflow you can think of around those processes. It is also an all-around great automation tool for your BI environment.
- Reporting Services has both a feature-rich developer-oriented authoring environment (Visual Studio / BI Development Studio) as well as a simplified end-user authoring tool (Report Builder). It has an enormous collection of visualization components built in, as well as an even bigger set of 3rd party controls to allow you to create just about any report you can imagine. The ability to extend Reporting Services with .Net code (if you have the developers) expands your options even further.
- The report authoring solutions in Reporting Services could be better, especially on the Report Builder (end-user oriented) side.