Microsoft Power BI - Gets the Job Done
May 04, 2021

Microsoft Power BI - Gets the Job Done

Alex Brielmann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power BI Pro

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

[Microsoft] Power BI was used at Conga mainly as a data visualization tool, while also using it as a repository for data from multiple systems. We used Snowflake to combine data from different systems and then housed everything in [Microsoft] Power BI. We could use data pulls to put together our weekly board deck, as well as to simply provide simple charts for all different teams throughout the entire sales process.
  • It's ability to store massive amounts of data allowed it to be a useful resource for multiple teams
  • Multiple different charts and graphs were available, making it far more visually stimulating than Salesforce native functionality
  • Data pulls are seamless and show up in easy formatting
  • A slightly clunky user interface, makes most end users fear building anything themselves
  • 3rd party api syncs seem to be a pretty heavy lift to set up
  • The overall set up when building a report is intimidating, and some buttons aren't clear, so hovering over all of them to see their labels can be time consuming and annoying
  • Allowed for data dumps that we used for our weekly board reports
  • Was our main repository for all data, allowed us to combine from multiple sources
  • We had a lot of breaks in our coding, which ate up a lot of time for our engineers to be fixing the process rather than improving upon in
Again, I would say [Microsoft] Power BI stacks up right in the middle against their competitors. It gets the job done in terms of data aggregation and visualization, but it lacks user experience and ease of building. Most sales reps I spoke with didn't like the tool because it wasn't easy to look at or pretty. And most developers didn't prefer building on it because it was clunky and we had a lot of bugs. At the end of the day it was usable and not the worst, so we dealt with it as we were a Microsoft company.

Do you think Microsoft Power BI delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Microsoft Power BI's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Power BI live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Power BI go as expected?

No

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

No

The tool does what is asked of it, with no frills. It is very usable, and gives you an end product that is helpful, but nobody is excited to use it. Overall, everyone that worked with this tool at our company was fine with it's offer, but I'm sure most would pay a little bit extra for a better tool.
I didn't have to deal directly with the support team, but they seemed to be responsive with our team of developers. If we had an urgent issue, we were typically able to get it resolved with a quick turnaround time. They are experienced employees, so I would assume nothing less, so it was nice to have those expectations met.
[Microsoft] Power BI seems to sit slightly in the middle of the road as a data aggregation and visualization tool. It has the look and feel of an old tool that should be mastered by now, but it's output does not seem to match that. Our team had to constantly fix errors and bugs, which is not what you are looking for from a tool coming from Microsoft. On the other side, it isn't as user friendly or pretty as a tool like Domo. It somewhat lies in the middle on both functionality and user experience.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
6
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
6
Drill-down analysis
5
Formatting capabilities
5
Report sharing and collaboration
6
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
5
Report Versioning
5
Report Delivery Scheduling
5
Delivery to Remote Servers
5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
5
Multi-User Support (named login)
4
Role-Based Security Model
5
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
5
Mobile Application
5
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
5
REST API
6
Javascript API
5
iFrames
5
Java API
6
Themeable User Interface (UI)
4
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
5