Power BI is getting there!
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
Implemented Power BI for a customer. Previously, they relied on Excel as well as legacy reporting tools that are difficult to use and author reports/dashboards. Power BI allows the customer to easily create dashboard and share across their organization. Power BI is easy to use for both the technical administrator and the end users. It also utilizes enterprise-class data source for the back end, which is Microsoft SQL Server database and SSAS for OLAP data sources. Row-level securities are easily managed using these data sources.
- Easy to use, intuitive
- Nicely designed dashboard visuals
- Relatively low cost to start out
- Ability to connect to many data sources that are currently available
- Still lacking some features of other more matured reporting tools
- Currently only available as a SAAS solution only, although Microsoft is working to release an on-premise version
- Qlik Sense and IBM Cognos
Power BI is a lot easier to use. The designs are also much nicer. Costs to implement Power BI (minus the existing data infrastructure) is much lower than other tools commercially available. However, the tool is still relatively new and still lacks many common features that other tools have. Microsoft is working to add as many features as possible in the future, so that is a promising sight.