Almost perfect for large organisations!
March 03, 2025

Almost perfect for large organisations!

Matt Aldridge | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Power BI Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a fundamentally important suite of software, used almost as often as Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, Outlook etc, within our organisation. Power BI enables us to process and analyse complex data and present information in a way that is easy to share, and display data to tell important stories.

Pros

  • Easy for non-developers to learn and use
  • Visual data analysis
  • Complex data modelling
  • Design
  • Licensing

Cons

  • Confusing to find settings and features for new users
  • Licensing limitations without premium licensing
  • Word clouds and other expected features require add ons
  • Requiring compute cost for basic machine learning analysis
  • Increased visibility of business insight
  • Enabled citizens to analyse data
  • increased financial accumen
Power BI is close to perfect as an overall application. It is very useable, and surprisingly elegant in its simplicity. However, there are some annoying things in the user interface, for example, the different menus you need to dig through to find the feature or setting you're looking for. It is easily the best app for data analysis for large organisations in the Microsoft ecosystem.
Power BI is much simple to use, and more modern than BusinessObjects, which has now been discontinued. It costs much less to license than Tableau which is perhaps more niche and designed better. It is also much more powerful for data analysis than excel, Smartsheet, Airtable, which are limited in their capabilities.

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 perfect for organisations already paying for Office 365 licensing which includes the Power BI Pro license. This will enable organisations to create a community that analyses and presents data effectively, to better understand their business. It also enables useful collaboration between the data technology team, and business areas.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.7
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
7
9.0
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
9
9.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
8
Delivery to Remote Servers
9
8.8
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
8
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
7
9.6
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Report-Level Access Control
10
Single Sign-On (SSO)
10
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
7
8.5
REST API
9
Javascript API
9
Java API
9
Themeable User Interface (UI)
7

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