One stop solution for your data visuluzation
We use Power BI for our daily reporting visualization. We often use it for analyzing big data and creating impactful visuals from them. We …
Starting at $10 per month per user
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What is Microsoft Power BI?
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…
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Popular Features
- Customizable dashboards (138)8.080%
- Drill-down analysis (138)7.272%
- Report sharing and collaboration (134)7.070%
- Formatting capabilities (137)6.464%
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://powerbi.microsoft.com/en…
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $10 per month per user
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powerbi.microsoft.com
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What is Microsoft Power BI?
Power BI: Comprehensive Business Intelligence Platform
Capabilities:
Discover Insights with AI: Utilizes advanced data-analysis tools, AI features, and a report-creation tool to transform complex data into accessible visuals, making it easier to uncover valuable insights.
Consolidate Data with OneLake: Integrates datasets from diverse sources into OneLake, creating a centralized, reliable source of truth for data. This integration reduces data duplication and simplifies analysis.
Drive Decision-Making: Infuse actionable insights into everyday applications like Microsoft 365, enhancing decision-making processes across the organization.
Empower Data Teams with Microsoft Fabric: Revolutionizes organization's data management and usage by incorporating Microsoft Fabric into the Power BI experience.
Key Differentiators:
Scalability: Power BI offers exceptional scalability, capable of transforming petabytes of data and supporting thousands of users without compromising performance.
Integration with Microsoft Ecosystem: Seamlessly embed and share insights across Microsoft services like Teams, PowerPoint, Excel, and the Power Platform, ensuring coherent and unified data handling.
Advanced AI Capabilities: Features AI tools that automatically find patterns, generate reports, and provide insights, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.
Robust Data Governance: Ensures data security and compliance with Microsoft's comprehensive governance and protection measures.
Copilot in Power BI:
- Efficient Report Generation: Generates reports rapidly using conversational language. Copilot in Power BI enables quick creation of DAX calculations, summaries, and tailored reports.
Integration with Microsoft Fabric:
Enhanced Accessibility: Allows interaction with reports and data across Microsoft Fabric workloads, even for users without paid licenses.
OneLake Data Hub: Facilitates the connection and curation of data from varied sources, promoting efficient data engineering.
Power BI PRO:
- Self-Service Analytics: License individuals for self-service analytics, enabling them to publish and share reports, fostering a culture of self-service BI.
Free Account Options:
Power BI Desktop & Free Trial: Offers a free app for data connection, modeling, and visualization, along with an easy-to-use report canvas.
Comprehensive Training: Access step-by-step Microsoft training courses to fully leverage Power BI capabilities.
Key Benefits:
Unified Data Management: Connect disparate data sources to establish a governed, unified source of truth.
Empower All Users: Ensures accessibility and ease of use for everyone, supported by free training resources and numerous accessibility features.
Immediate Start: Quickly begin with report creation, AI-generated reports, and a wide range of templates.
Customer Engagement: Enhance user engagement in apps by embedding Power BI reports.
Microsoft Power BI Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Windows App
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: In-memory data model
- Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
- Supported: ETL Capability
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: ODBC
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: ParAccel
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Sage 500
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: SAP
- Supported: Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Versioning
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
- Supported: Delivery to Remote Servers
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Predictive Analytics
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
- Supported: Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features
- Supported: REST API
- Supported: Javascript API
- Supported: Java API
- Supported: Themeable User Interface (UI)
Microsoft Power BI Screenshots
Microsoft Power BI Competitors
Microsoft Power BI Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | Asia Pacific, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States |
| Supported Languages | Arabic, Basque - Basque, Bulgarian - Български, Catalan - català, Chinese (Simplified) - 中文(简体), Chinese (Traditional) - 中文(繁體), Croatian - hrvatski, Czech - čeština, Danish - dansk, Dutch - Nederlands, English - English, Estonian - eesti, Finnish - suomi, French - français, Galician - galego, German - Deutsch, Greek - Ελληνικά, Hebrew, Hindi - हिंदी, Hungarian - magyar, Indonesian - Bahasa Indonesia, Italian - italiano, Japanese - 日本語, Kazakh - Қазақ, Korean - 한국어, Latvian - latviešu, Lithuanian - lietuvių, Malay - Bahasa Melayu, Norwegian (Bokmål) - norsk (bokmål), Polish - Polski, Portuguese (Brazil) - Português, Portuguese (Portugal) - português, Romanian - română, Russian - Русский, Serbian (Cyrillic) - српски, Serbian (Latin) - srpski, Slovak - slovenčina, Slovenian - slovenski, Spanish - español, Swedish - svenska, Thai - ไทย, Turkish - Türkçe, Ukrainian - українська, Vietnamese - Tiếng Việt |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Microsoft Power BI starts at $10.
Reviewers rate Javascript API highest, with a score of 9.6.
The most common users of Microsoft Power BI are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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February 23, 2018
A Modular Approach to BI
Power BI is currently being used by several management level stakeholders within our company. We have built a management data mart in Amazon Redshift data warehousing infrastructure which powers all the dashboards built on Power BI. Important company level decisions are made based on the Microsoft Power BI dashboards. There were numerous reports floating around in emails and Excel sheets with a different data definition for each report before Microsoft Power BI was put in place. The dashboards provide C levels to make critical decisions and the live data capabilities in Microsoft Power BI provides us to make marketing campaign decisions swiftly.
- One of the most important features in Microsoft Power BI is its minimal learning curve required. excel proficiency would be enough to get even a non BI person to build powerful dashboards
- Powerpivot DAX functionalities are prevalent in Power BI which allows us to perform time series data manipulation. It also allows to
- Excel is versatile and Microsoft Power BI allows integration with office 365 and excel. Management often loves to view numbers on excel and with the help of plugins and publishing fixed pivot tables online, Microsoft Power Bi brings the functionality of excel to interactive dashboards.
- Multiple data source integration is quite powerful and robust.
- Microsoft Power BIis very modular if a functionality is missing a third-party app can be downloaded to fill the gap, this is particularly a powerful feature as not all tools can have all the features in place.
- Every month there are updates to the software and it allows for a free one year trial subscription
- The natural language query and machine learning support to analyze graphs and quickly summarize data is a fancy plus to have.
- The community is vast and open source communities are active to build apps and help to debug errors and aid in workarounds.
- The drilling functionalities on dimension allow the dashboards to be more interactive.
- The data can be manipulated step by step in the backend to arrange the data in the required format. Each step can be manipulated or isolated to achieve the desired result. Example Transform, Transpose, Reverse rows etc
- Dashboards are quite fast and interactive as the data is stored in the cloud in the backend instead of hitting the database
- It can connect to plenty of third-party online services to draw data like Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Sharepoint etc.
- One of the major drawbacks of Power BI is its inability to do incremental data loads effectively. The data needs to be refreshed in its entirety, consuming a lot of resources., even when the same data is required in multiple tables. The query is fired for each instance of the table.
- Lacks external input capabilities within the dashboard. There are no forms infrastructure to input and play around with the dashboard.
- Time-based KPIs need improvement and needs modeling and constant debugging is required to get DAX based functions right.
- The Q&A feature is far from being usable. The questions are often hard to put across.
- The pivot functionality is highly under-utilized. The excel pivot tables can make Microsoft Power BIi a very powerful tool to use.
- Hosting Microsoft Power BIi on portals akin to Tableau online is not available
- Minute details on formatting still needs to improve.
- Data level security and user group specification needs to improve
- On premise power bi report server are expensive option when compared to BI Tools
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90%
9.0
77.5%
7.8
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6.2
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7.3
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6.3
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7.3
100%
10.0
Power BI, Tableau, and QlikView are the market leaders when analyzed on Gartner`s magic quadrant for business intelligence tool. One of the critical drawbacks of all these visionary tools is the absence or expensive back end that are needed to support the infrastructure. Incremental data load is absent which is a critical requirement these days. PBI also lacks data level security and user group management compared to others. The learning curve in PBI is the least (because of excel and Powerpivot and exception of DAX) compared to other tools. PBI cannot be used for high data processing when compared to tools like Birst which has a robust backend to support the load.
- Ability to perform Data manipulation on the backend to arrange data as per dashboard and reporting needs
- Import various data sources from online services especially third party data serivces like salesforce, GA etc
- Comparing plan numbers and budgeting and also installing third party modular apps to support advance analytics
- Input external data in a hosted dashboard
- Downloading sample data from the dashboard or easy sharing of a particular view or annotation
- Performing DAX based functions on time series and variance comparisons and making adjustment in viz.
Yes, but I don't use it