Wonderful Data Visualisation Platform. Perfect for Smaller Organisations At Lower Price Point.
April 26, 2019

Wonderful Data Visualisation Platform. Perfect for Smaller Organisations At Lower Price Point.

Peter Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

We built out numerous dashboards in order to support the analysis post-data gathering for all our core discovery methodologies.

This allowed us to quickly spin up are variable data sets mid- and or post-project in order to start validating results and identify areas required for cleaning etc. prior to analysis and presentation back to our clients with the results.

The free visual market place really helped bolster the initially limiting range of visualizations it comes with out of the box.
  • 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.
Microsoft Power BI has a better UI for the most part, runs efficiently, and has an excellent data management & transformation mechanism.

It is lacking some more advanced features of the latter (TIBCO Spotfire), but I firmly believe this is the better tool for most pieces of analysis I have had to perform.
This is probably my favorite BI platform I have used to date. It feels a bit younger though, missing some features other platforms have. However, it makes up for this with its low price point for small businesses and great feature set that allows easy elimination of bugs and errors in your dashboards through to the ability to layer visuals on top of each other to get around things like limited numbers of Axis in certain visuals.

There are a few things you have to tweak constantly, tucked away in dropdown menus, that could be much more intuitive actions by clicking on components in visuals, like changing a title, axis name, etc. But the foundations are solid.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
7
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
4
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
4
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated