Power BI - great "free" BI tool for analysts and developers.
April 05, 2021

Power BI - great "free" BI tool for analysts and developers.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power BI Pro

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

[Microsoft] Power BI is being used by our BI team (developers) and business analysts in selected Departments. It is a tool of choice for a quick data analysis and dashboard creation primary for 311 city services (service requests), Health/Vaccination (COVID) public facing analysis and purchasing improvement process.
  • Ability to connect to many different data sources
  • Ease of access (basic version is free)
  • Integration with office modules
  • Cloud based (Azure) architecture
  • Confusing licensing for Pro and Premium
  • Steep learning curve
  • Too many features are hard to find
  • Ability to create professional visualizations in minutes
  • Connection to previously unavailable data sources
  • No need for team of developers
  • Quick turnaround time
Microsoft Power BI is part of the MS product family, and since we are a Microsoft shop (Office365, Azure, SQL DB) it fits into our environment with centralized management/administration. This alone justified additional costs (licensing). Tableau and SAP Business Objects are natively on premise tools, so there is an additional effort to go to the cloud. Also, each is separately managed (except with AD authentication).

SAP Business Objects is an enterprise reporting solution, so it is not a fair comparison. However, Tableau is very similar to Power BI, with great visualizations and more user friendly features. However, it is much more expensive and with complex public facing server option.

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Power BI go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Power BI again?

Yes

[Microsoft Power BI] is a great BI tool for developers and data/business analysts. With free desktop version (no time constrain) and basic data source knowledge you can create professional visualizations. You can share your work with other PBI users, or even post/embody it on the web. With cloud based architecture it provides vast sharing capabilities, but with additional licensing, which can be confusing and very strict.
[Microsoft] Power BI support is pretty generic, and it does take time to reach a right resource. Very often their solutions are KB articles not really relevant to my problem. This an area for improvement. I always try to research my issue on PBI message boards/user community sites.
Since virtually all organizations are using Microsoft's products, Power BI comes "baked in" with your Office 365 licensing. To end users, it is free, and you can do a lot with this free desktop version. Analysts and developers with data source knowledge can very quickly create pretty advances and interactive visualizations - with zero additional costs. You can even share your output with another Power BI desktop user, or via free Power BI viewer tool.

Problems start if you want to distribute and share your work on a broader scale. You need to purchase additional licenses, which to us was kind of confusing (pro vs premium) and expensive. If you are not a Microsoft shop, this can be a showstopper.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
6
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
6
Drill-down analysis
7
Formatting capabilities
6
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
7
Publish to Web
7
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
5
Delivery to Remote Servers
3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
9
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
REST API
6
Javascript API
8
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
7
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated