AI probably wins out but Free Microsoft Power BI beats other traditional dashboarding software.
March 07, 2025

AI probably wins out but Free Microsoft Power BI beats other traditional dashboarding software.

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

Software Version

Power BI Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power BI

I've used Microsoft Power BI at various locations throughout my career. Currently use it as a metrics dashboard for executives & decision makers. Ideally, we have this implemented so Business Leaders that don't have access to specific Databases can get access to visualized information to help make decisions. Another large reason we use this is to display metrics to our various tv's to show off our progress.

Pros

  • Centralized Reports
  • Database Connections
  • Works with Excel

Cons

  • UI / UX
  • Simplicity
  • Ease of Use
  • Allows Executives to view metrics they likely don't have direct access to
  • Notice trends in Users faster than without Dashboards
  • Free Software so no "associated" cost to using it.
Takes a little bit to get used to it. Not natively intuitive but fairly straight forward to pick up. Also docking it a few points because you can create a really clean, simple UI in Claude very quickly that's faster than building all of this yourself in Microsoft Power BI.
Microsoft Power BI is free. If I didn't want to create a custom platform (i.e. my organization insisted on an existing platform that I *had* to use), I'd use Microsoft Power BI. For any start-up or SMB, I'd just use Claude & Grok to build it quickly, also for free. Would not pay for Tableau or Sigma anymore. Not worth it at all.

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?

No

If your business is primarily in Microsoft Products (i.e. Excel Spreadsheets, Access databases, etc...), it's pretty easy to connect everything. The problem with Microsoft Power BI is that I can literally create nearly every item on a dashboard with a few prompts into Grok / ChatGPT / DeepSeek. Would definitely choose to create custom right now with AI over Microsoft Power BI. Microsoft Power BI does outperform paid services like Tableau though. Would not pay for a dashboarding service ever again.

Microsoft Power BI Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.3
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
9.0
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
9
9.4
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
9
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Delivery to Remote Servers
9
7.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
5
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
6
9.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Report-Level Access Control
9
Single Sign-On (SSO)
9
9.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated

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