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Power BI is quickly becoming an industry leader
March 23, 2016

Power BI is quickly becoming an industry leader

Tom Jaskula | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI provides interactive dashboards to use for data discovery and data visualizations. Every department that has questions to ask of their data can benefit from Power BI. Power BI addresses the need that many organizations have for quick insight into their data and in many situations it can reduce the reliance on operational reporting.
  • Power BI is constantly evolving because Microsoft is pushing updates to Power BI on a regular basis. This means you'll have all of the newest features or functions without having to upgrade or pay anything extra.
  • Power BI is very cost friendly to cost conscious CIOs and organizations. Power BI is priced at a fraction of some of the competing products.
  • Power BI has built in connectivity with a plethora of mainstream cloud based data sources. The real bonus is that after you connect to them, Power BI creates a default dashboard for you that is unique to the data source you are connecting to.
  • Row based security is not yet integrated with Power BI. To have row based security you need to use Power BI in conjunction with another Microsoft BI tool. The good news is that if you own SQL Server you already own the other tool that you need.
  • Power BI is not as mature as some of the competition and some of the visualization features are a bit behind the competition. Power BI is rapidly catching up, however.
  • At this point in time, Microsoft only offers cloud based dashboard sharing. Microsoft's strategy for onsite Power BI continues to evolve.

From a user perspective, Power BI appears to be more intuitive than Birst. You don't need a training class to learn or use Power BI.

Power BI Desktop is free, other vendors are charging for desktop licenses.

If your organization is bound by very strict rules and regulations regarding cloud based solutions, then Microsoft Power BI may not be for you. In many cases though, the infrastructure behind Power BI is more secure than your onsite infrastructure, but it can be difficult convincing your IT security team that this is true.

Power BI has proven to be a great fit in manufacturing, transportation, retail, and non profit organizations just to name a few. Generally speaking though, Power BI can be a fit for any company that is open to cloud and is especially a good fit for companies that are already invested in Microsoft technologies.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
9.0
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
9
Report Formatting Templates
9
9.5
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
8
10.0
Publish to Web
10
8.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
8
8.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
6
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
10.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
10
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated