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We use Power BI for our daily reporting visualization. We often use it for analyzing big data and creating impactful visuals from them. We …
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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
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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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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).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(1782)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(76-100 of 140)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
- Similar to office 365 applications such as Excel and Access, that is, it facilitates the usability of those who already have advanced knowledge of these tools.
- Optimal ways of presenting data.
- Data collect.
- Control panel.
- Sometimes the table relationship is not no simple to set up.
- Certain elements are very limited, in the visual part mainly.
- The tool is unnecessary in relation to the panel interface compared to Tableau.
July 05, 2019
A great and interactive business analytics tool
- The cost of it, really affordable.
- Power BI has a great integration with other tools like Office 365, Azure, etc.
- Navigation is very similar to Microsoft Excel, so if you are already acquainted with Excel, you'll have no problems with BI.
- Great variety of chart types, I think it is around sixteen different ones.
- If you are not a Microsoft Excel power user, it can be a little challenging to use.
- Slow performance if you have a huge amount of data to analyze.
- Has a very bulky user interface.
June 24, 2019
Enterprise adoption of Power BI
- Ability to build visuals with drag-and-drop makes creating dashboards easy for beginners
- Great training materials and videos online for self-training
- Ability to work across Microsoft's other platforms
- Easy sharing of dashboards and built in "usage metrics"
- Moving reports between the desktop version and Power BI can be cumbersome and lead to multiple versions
June 13, 2019
Data Visualization and Data Analyzes
- Intuitive and User-Friendly
- R Statistical Modelling modules integrated
- Very well integrated with Microsoft applications.
- Not very easy to make custom graphs and charts
- Requires some time to get used to the interface
- Documentation can be more detailed
- Easy-to-use and straight forward design - decreasing onboarding and training efforts.
- Powerful features - you can either work on standard reports or advanced analytics capabilities. Power Pivot enables quick merge of data from various sources.
- Integration with Microsoft stack and suite - great upside as most of the things currently are based on Microsoft (Office 365, Azure cloud and others).
- Some type of data entry, like forms, could be improved. They are not easy to use and flexible.
- Overall cost is higher than other suites and products regarding data visualization.
May 13, 2019
Power BI - Good, and Getting Better Constantly
- Ease of constructing graphs.
- Always updated visuals being offered.
- Variety of data sources to be able to pull data.
- Does not allow for parameters to be passed to the system as part of a user interaction.
- Cannot share data to our shareholders that are outside of our domain.
- Is not yet a complete solution. Still using other reporting tools in addition.
- It is a great tool for Visualization.
- Microsoft always brings monthly updates to this tool. It is great to see the new features and functionalities that are being added constantly.
- Power BI is an excellent tool to create all kinds of reports and data visualization. It can go from very simple reports to complex ones.
- There are enormous amount of Knowledge articles , YouTube videos and the support community to answer any question one has on Power BI. This makes life much easier.
- Compared to Tableau, it feels like Power BI can improve on the new templates for visualization.
April 26, 2019
Wonderful Data Visualisation Platform. Perfect for Smaller Organisations At Lower Price Point.
- Data Links, Visual Aid, and Wizard make the process very simple. We found we needed a two-way link 99% of the time but the default was a one-way link that needs changing each time you import etc.
- Terminology and usability are similar to Excel and Access making it easy to pick up and start creating for most advanced users of those applications.
- Very powerful out of the box, and even when using the free service it is incredibly capable if working on smaller data sets.
- Limited visualizations out of the box, market place does help improve this.
- Some visuals, such as maps, are a bit limiting by default
- Method of creation is very different from Tableau or Spotfire increasing learning time when switching platforms.
- Many statistical elements cannot be visualized or calculated such as Confidence Levels, Intervals etc. This must be added.
- Easy to build the reports you need. Allows users with any level of experience to start building reports.
- Users can interact with reports in a natural way allowing them to start using the reports with no/little training or guidance.
- Powerful enough to handle any report from any data source and size.
- Secure handling of data and able to ensure the right data is visible to the right people.
- Large community of users and resources.
- Greater flexibility in formatting the look and feel or reports and dashboards.
- Embedding Dashboards the way reports can be embedded.
April 11, 2019
The Power Of Business Intelligence
- Visualization
- Data gathering
- Dashboard
- Functionality
- Integration
- Visualization Tools
March 28, 2019
Great B2B tool, but falls short of the competition for B2C solution delivery and pricing.
- Quick turnaround to model the art of what's possible.
- Quickly connect to any data source and provide data modeling and transformations.
- Lots of the out-of-the-box visualizations do a good job of showing our clients their data in a different and useful way.
- Business-to-client offerings fall short. The pricing tier of exposing clients' information from a B2C standpoint scares some of our clients away. We end up proposing a competitor to Power BI as a solution when this arises.
- Lack of governance can lead to citizen "BI" developers creating data models that don't present accurate data.
- Pricing, as mentioned above. The PowerBI Pro, used for internal enterprise consumption, is priced well. However, if you want to deploy a solution from a B2C standpoint, PowerBI is not a good choice for smaller clients.
March 20, 2019
Power BI - Excellent Tool
- Easy to use
- Good presentation possibilities
- Easy to connect to different sources
- A better way to set up relationships between tables, such as allowing secondary relationships to be active
February 15, 2019
Power BI: bringing life to your disparate data
- Power BI has a step by step approach to integrating data that makes it really easy to get exactly what you want out of your raw data. If you do one manipulation wrong, you can see it right away with the preview.
- Power BI already contains a wide variety of visual objects you can use but you can also create your own if you have a specific need. Mind you, this will require some node.js knowledge but there are a lot of available tutorials online.
- The access to the software is extremely easy for people in any organisation as the base software is free (The Author version). It is limited slightly in terms of collaboration and refresh capacity but is perfect for evaluation or one time data analysis.
- The pricing for pro is a subscription format which I personally dislike. It is also heavily focused on cloud deployment which is probably fine for most of the people but if you need a solution installed on-premise, this solution could be a little more complex (at least it seemed like it to me when we talked about it).
January 07, 2019
Microsoft Power BI can em-Power data visualizations and analyses
- Visualization.
- Report generation.
- Ease of use - no need for hard-core coding.
- Limitations on the input file size.
- Sharing visualizations with external parties, eg consultants.
- It integrates easily with other applications, especially true of Microsoft products.
- No specialized technical training needed to get using it quickly.
- A simple learning curve for people used to a Microsoft environment, familiar feel.
- There are only a few data sources that permit real-time connections to reports
- Limit of 1GB per dataset.
- On-prem installs of the product are very expensive.
January 01, 2019
New to and excited about Power BI
- Provide quick graphs from spreadsheet data
- It's pretty easy to learn how to use the product without help
- It calculates data and gives suggestions for use
- I'm not sure it needs a lot of improvement, but I guess it could provide some clear suggestions when you first start using the product
- It could be a no-cost option with our Microsoft portfolio
- It could give more suggestions when you are configuring items
December 28, 2018
Power BI, create for ad hor reporting but not for dashboarding
- Easily connect to multiple databases or cloud solutions.
- Possibility to modify datasets or change formatting in Power BI vs having to modify data at the source.
- Since Power BI can cache locally some of the data, it's possible to continue working offline on datasets.
- A bit heavy to run and not that intuitive compared to other tools.
- Dashboarding is really a pain compared to other tools and the visualization provided with the tool are not what you should expect.
- Very very frequent updates that require you to reinstall the software almost on a monthly basis. Will need admin rights from your organization.
December 07, 2018
Great Business Intelligence solution for Low Cost
- Ability to connect to many different data sources and provide a easy to read graphical output.
- There is a free version that comes with our O365 subscription that suits most cases and a paid version for the power users.
- Many different chart types to choose from and active selection criteria makes the charts user interactive
- Power BI lacks in its ability to integrate directly into AAD to allow you to customize reports based on logged in user.
- Power BI has issues when trying to access multiple data sets for a report. The data needs to be manipulated outside for Power BI before being used in Power BI.
November 28, 2018
Microsoft Power BI can provide the right data, in the right format, wherever you are.
- Easy to combine data views.
- Dynamic filtering and across reporting objects.
- Mobile dashboard is easy to build and use.
- Dax queries interface is not quite simple.
- Customizing colors and fonts could be easier.
- Copying data models and apply to different datasets.
November 26, 2018
O365 bundle, might as well use it
- Office 365 package
- Monthly updates
- Ease of use
- Clunky and unresponsive in some situations
- Not very engaging or appealing to view
- Perceived as sub-standard
November 21, 2018
Power BI for quick and affordable insights
- Quick and easy dashboard deployment
- Easy integration to existing system (both API and raw data imports were used)
- Mobile platform (tablets) support
- I can not think of any. Until now, all works well!
November 09, 2018
Microsoft BI great for analytics
- Microsoft BI integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft Office suite.
- By using the Power Pivot and Power View it has enabled us to access and mash up data from a variety of sources. Plus it can easily be shared with other users through simple Office applications.
- The implementation time for Microsoft BI can be fairly lengthy. Its definitely longer than some of the other products we evaluated.
- The upfront investment in terms of capital and time is fairly large with this tool. It requires a compliant Microsoft SQL server in the back-end to leverage most of its functionality.
October 22, 2018
Power BI is a powerful visual tool that does not disappoint. User friendly and rich content...Elegant!
- Microsoft Power BI has beautiful visuals that are made in-house and externally. It really helps you develop a story.
- Microsoft Power BI also has an easy to setup database model reader and can really help you at ease with development of buttons/controls for the end user.
- The web portal works well and users have easy access to their sales data.
- Using the PRO version, the data reader feeding raw data can be very slow and clunky at times.
- Even with a node subscription, paying a lot of money, performance for loading and refreshing content on a Power BI dashboard can be very slow.
- Power BI is a visual tool but does not have CPM functionality to add data and other parts into the data model. This is a huge portion that is lacking.
September 27, 2018
Power BI from an enterprise perspective
- Connectivity with Microsoft tools - As you would expect, since they are developed by the same company, BI is well integrated with the other Microsoft tools such as Excel that are ubiquitous in the workforce.
- Price - One of the nicest things about BI is its cheap price tag, compared to to other visualization software like Tableau.
- Excellent variety of visualizations.
September 10, 2018
Power BI is a very good low cost option to democratize BI
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Quick and easy dashboard development
- Self-Service BI capabilities
- Mobile support
- Great amount of data visualizations
- It is complex to secure access to data taking into account different user profiles.
- Q&A feature needs to be improved