A great tool for the analyst's toolbox and for sharing reporting within a team or department.
Updated August 09, 2019
A great tool for the analyst's toolbox and for sharing reporting within a team or department.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI
We have three BI solutions within our business, Power BI, Qlik View and Qlik Sense. Primary management reporting, dashboards and report distribution are done with Sense, basic marketing views are done through View and most power analytics and ad-hoc analytical work is done via Power BI. We find Power BI is best when data resides in several places and mostly spreadsheets. Using Power BI to connect directly into source systems (even Microsoft branded products Azure SQL Server) cause the app to time out. So company-wide we use sense, and functional analysts across all departments have Power BI to dig deeper than Sense can go.
- Data blending from several different files is a big hit with our Power BI users. We have so many excel and CSV files and many of them are not clean, so making use of the data cleaning and blending saves us from countless pivots and lookups to just get data worthy of analyzing.
- The visualizations are top notch, and available without additional cost. Everything is in vibrant colors and crisp, clear lines that whatever your produce is clearly pleasing to the eye. From mapping down to pie charts, the visuals are well done.
- The Beta preview is very helpful, not all software allows you to preview or use things in beta, but Power BI has a wonderful set of tools and visualizations you can add into your work with very little effort or complexity.
- Power BI lacks in horsepower compared to other tools with more robust ETL components built in. Particularly if you connect to any type of source system database like SQL, you have to either have a SQL View built for you that limits the volume of data your bring in, or have solid knowledge of the SQL table structures to build yourself custom (and correct!) connections to the tables.
- Security is not as robust as other BI tools, like Qlik Sense. We often need to restrict subsets of data by customer and even functional position of an individual within a customer. Power BI’s security seems to be built for using just within a company, so if you leverage your work outside the firewall there can be issues when figuring out security streams.
- I do not like the pricing. It’s really a dirty trick, Microsoft goes around and says the product is free. Well, the stand-alone is free, yes, but you have to pay for the “enterprise” version so you can share files. They say it only costs $10 a month/user, which again is a white lie. You need much more IT infrastructure and people to build SQL views and Tabular Models so you can use the tool, and Microsoft does not tell you that. So we find it is a good stand-alone tool to analytics, but a fairly heavy cost structure if you roll it out enterprise-wide as compared to Qlik or Tableau (which are more expensive per license, but require less back-office support).
Power BI does not have the feel of a fully independent and robust BI Solution. It tackles smaller functional or department-level analytic needs and can operate in a small or solo roll-out environment. But scaling up to enterprise would be better suited for Qlik or Tableau. Same thing with any imbedding into Salesforce, if you’re rolling this out from a NOT IT-driven perspective you should go with Power BI for the cheap licensing and let IT absorb the costs for additional staff to support it on the back end. If you are IT-driven in the roll out, use Qlik so the business units pay the higher license costs but you need less staff to support them.