Item: Microsoft Power BI
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have different uses cases for [Microsoft] Power BI (Desktop and Pro), from the Desktop side, we have many vendor exported CSV financial data, this data is generated every month with tens of thousands of rows and hundreds of columns, this data needs to be crunched and converted into human readable reports.
We import these CSVs to a central data source (SQL Server) and then use Power BI Desktop to transform this data into phenomenal interactive drilldown reports for the executive and financial departments to easily review and take immediate decisions, the transformation is fairly easily and intuitive and the outcomes are very satisfying.

On the [Microsoft] Power BI Pro side, we have it connected to a few online data sources from the cloud, with its automated refresh functionality, we are getting fresh and up to date reports and analytics that help our management make decisions quickly and effectively, [Microsoft] Power BI is an amazing product!

Pros and Cons

Easy to setup and develop solid reports
Supports a substantial number of data sources to import from and connect to
Great reports designer with many chart types and customizations
Intuitive interface
Desktop and Pro versions are reasonably priced

The desktop app is great but needs a lot of performance improvements
No MacOS Version for the Desktop app, this is a big limitation for business since executives prefer Macs
Premium Cloud Version of Power BI is awfully expensive
On-Premise Version of the Power BI Reports Server is bundled only with SQL Server Enterprise License and cannot be purchased separately and requires Software Assurance Subscription
On-Premise Power BI Report Server doesn't support ADFS, AzureAD or any Claims-Based authentication platform, a sad disadvantage for enterprises

Return on Investment

Saved our company many hours crunching data and building reports
Reporting and Insights provided are invaluable to any business and are critical to business visibility and success
A small price to pay for the great benefits it provides and the effort it saves, this product truly gives a meaning to meaningless data and helps drive critical future business decisions
Our visibility into our financial data and operations exponentially increased, decisions are easily made based on factual data without missing any important factor

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

The most well-known competitor for [Microsoft] Power BI that can actually compete with the rich feature set it provides is Tableau, it is an excellent product, providing almost all of the features that Power BI provides, however, when we made the purchasing decision, Tableau was much more expensive than Power BI, like really expensive, and comes with a complex licensing model.

[Microsoft] Power BI on the other hand is fairly priced for the Pro version with a Free version that does well, while I believe that Tableau is a very powerful product, it is not something I would recommend to anyone, it would be more reasonable to be used by specific data analysts, Power BI on the other hand is more "useful and easier to use for the common business person", and surely much cheaper.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Azure Front Door, Azure Traffic Manager, Azure Application Gateway, Azure App Service, Azure DNS

Usability

[Microsoft] Power BI is fairly easy to use, quick to setup and simple to build reports, it's very quick and easy to create your first report using it, a small learning curve is required to build your first report, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes much easier to work with and with time you start to build great reports and get more future insights and forecasts from your data.

One downside is the desktop app performance, the app gets stuck sometimes, and usually spends time processing even when the data is very small, there is surely an area for improvement on the performance side.

Support Rating

The support community for [Microsoft] Power BI is huge and online forums are full of questions and answers that helped us get up to speed with the product, additionally, Microsoft's own support was very helpful and did provide valuable support on issues we initially faced, I would give the support experience and the availability of support resources an "A+" for this product

Likelihood to Recommend

I would definately recommend [Microsoft] Power BI, its an amazing product, despite of the cons, the product is still remarkable and unique in the values that it provides.

If you have scattered data left undiscovered, or need solid reporting and analytics, or even just simply want to impress your management with detailed, beautiful and organized reports that are automatically refreshed with fresh content, Power BI is absolutely the tool to go for.
It can import data from an overwhelming amount of sources, such as Excel, SQL Server, Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, Sales Force, MySQL, Amazon Redshift and many others, and it allows you to quickly and easily build and publish beautiful reports that always impresses the executives and management.

[Microsoft] Power BI is one of a few products that I would recommend to literally anyone who uses a computer, there is always a use case for Power BI, especially the desktop version, the moment you create your first report you realize how much time and effort it saves and how much insights it gives on your data, personally, Power BI is an essential part of my work and I truly enjoy building reports and gathering/transforming data using it.

Data will never be the same again, thanks to PowerBI

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI