Microsoft Power BI Reviews

Nikhil K.Mr.

5.0

Power BI a popular choice for businesses and organizations looking to harness the power of data for informed decision-making. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Abhishek B.Analytics Analyst

5.0

Power BI is one of the most important visualization platform we use for analysis of data because it gives us the data in graphs and readable manner. Power BI is much better app as it is fast and reliable than other apps. It Gives you options of performing analysis on Data by Creating Different kind of charts which leads to benefit of Organization Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nick v.Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)

4.5

These characteristics, in combination, make Power BI Desktop a tool that is not only powerful but also highly accessible for every day use. It empowers users to harness the full potential of their data, regardless of their skill level, and this accessibility is what many users appreciate the most about the software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Information Technology and ServicesSmall-Business(50 or fewer emp.)

0.5

PowerBI Desktop is clunky and dysfunctional. (Why am I on the freaking desktop anyways? It's the cloud era.) It constantly throws errors and has an inexplicable permissions system. Also it fails to inform the user why errors are occurring and how to resolve them. Its refresh cycle is a joke (2 hours?) and control over report layout is limited. Its tables and matrixes are badly designed, not able to render rows and columns intuitively. This product was clearly made offshore. Every element of the UI and architecture screams "second rate". Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in PharmaceuticalsEnterprise(> 1000 emp.)

0.5

Dog slow application, no way to center the text on certain items, cannot pin open the Format section (it keeps closing when you click off of an object), cannot select and move multiple objects, no way to align objects, no way to right-click and format objects, Ctrl+Z does not work to undo, timelines and Gantt charts are completely ignored, stupid/weird spaning around objects no way to round corners on fields, field border colors are ignored, no way to autofit tables to visual, no way to turn off autorefresh when designing dashboard to name just a few. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Medical DevicesEnterprise(> 1000 emp.)

1.5

Power BI is essentially a repackaged Excel and uses Microsoft's frustrating M language. This prevents users from using proven languages and methods and obfuscates truly understanding the data. It also lacks the horsepower for large datasets and visuals. Moreover, the visual compilation of dashboards is clunky and uninspiring. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Ahrat K.Graphic Design

5.0

A partir de Power BI, on peut aisment se connecter d'autres sources de donnes, y compris des bases de donnes SQL, Excel, SharePoint, Salesforce etc.

Anonymous ReviewerComputer Software

5.0

It is user friendly, it has the drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy for users to create interactive reports and dashboard.

Joel B.Consumer Services

5.0

Data input from many sources is made simple by Power BI's integration with other Microsoft products including Excel, SharePoint, and Azure.

William A.Information Technology and Services

1.0

Limited functionality, customization, bugged filters and graphs. Lack of support, support website not working

Anonymous ReviewerComputer Software

1.0

Very tough to scale if you have a lot of data.

Steven R.Food & Beverages

2.0

There are simply too many software that do the Same thing if not more.

Tom JaskulaData Analytics Practice Lead

5.0

Microsoft Power BI provides interactive dashboards to use for data discovery and data visualizations. Every department that has questions to ask of their data can benefit from Power BI. Power BI addresses the need that many organizations have for quick insight into their data and in many situations it can reduce the reliance on operational reporting.
Power BI is constantly evolving because Microsoft is pushing updates to Power BI on a regular basis. This means you'll have all of the newest features or functions without having to upgrade or pay anything extra. Power BI is very cost friendly to cost conscious CIOs and organizations. Power BI is priced at a fraction of some of the competing products. Power BI has built in connectivity with a plethora of mainstream cloud based data sources. The real bonus is that after you connect to them, Power BI creates a default dashboard for you that is unique to the data source you are connecting to.

jim parolyFreelance Photographer

5.0

Power BI is a very good tool to create quick reports with beautiful visualizations and a great tool to research your data visually. I think that seeing your data in a visual way can help you see things you may miss with a standard report. I use it to track my projects to compare costs and revenues.
Power BI allows you to show or look at your data in different types of visualizations easily and quickly. It is light-weight with great selection of visualization tools (with many add-ons available for extra types of visualization). You can create reports using the easy to use and elegant looking dashboard which would be familiar to Excel users. The data you analyze can come from single or multiple data sources, with a huge selection of data source types. The reports and graphs you create can be easily customized to suit your needs or taste. New features are being added rapidly (which can be a con for some as it can result in having to re-learn to use some of the operations).

Samantha BollmannUser Experience Analyst

5.0

We originally put together some projects in Power BI surrounding the methods by which shareholders contact us. Our dashboards included visualizations of how our shareholders call us, use our IVR, and access our website. We also made some visualizations regarding demographics. We are possibly looking in the future to utilize Power BI for replacing OLAP cubes in Excel. Currently we are only using Power BI among a small number of groups in different regions as we are still exploring fuller implementation. I find Power BI to be an extremely useful and easy-to-learn tool (if you have previous Excel experience) that only becomes more and more useful each month when updates come out. Power BI's data visualization capabilities makes it easy to make discoveries in our vast amount of data and present it in an easy-to-absorb way.
Constant updates and improvements. Power BI provides FREE major updates every month which has been making the product more and more useful over time. Reading the update log is always exciting because Microsoft is always putting out new features are legitimately useful for me. Power BI connects easily to a huge variety of data sources, even those outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. You can even connect to websites and pull data right off of their pages. For example, you can link to Google or Yahoo Finance and pull information about stocks right into your dashboard for free. Tons of visualizations. Power BI has many different visualizations for dashboards and more are released every month. On top of those that are released, you can download more from the web as they are open-source. You can even code your own. Power BI is increasing its R capabilities which is excellent as R is the most widely used statistical programming language. This makes it so Power BI easily integrates into already established data science departments. R can also be used to add more visualizations to Power BI. Power BI is the cheapest data visualization tool at $10 per month per user. You can also get a lot done with the free version.

Berlynn PierceCRM senior digital associate

1.5

Currently used heavily by finance and data management teams and used by marketing folks to understand customer behavior.
Difficult as a marketer to find data or create reports. Need additional training options to view capability and how to or where to find data. Search bar functionality not intuitive, at least keep it sticky rather than needing to hover over the bottom of a list.

Verified User

2.5

Microsoft Power BI can be a substitute for various visualization software that is out in the market such as Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, Cognos, QlikView and so on. The finance team uses Power BI. Many other smaller teams use Power BI for quick visualizations. And it is free of cost.
It's slow in nature. The functionalities are not in one place, it's diverse.

Mark MetzEnterprise Services Consultant

3.0

I attempted to use the application as a substitute for tables and graphs in Excel. It seemed to be a good tool to set up graphical representations of mobile device usage and email usage. What it made available seemed to match what was being produced by several people in Excel or PowerPoint. The features seem to have a very good user interface to make the process much easier.
Instructions very lacking. Ability to work sizing and presentation of the data was very difficult. Although UI seems easy, there were several limitations on how I could present the data (look and feel for web page display).

Verified ReviewerVerified LinkedIn UserHead of Application Services (System Administrator & Controlling Function)

2.0

Overall: In light of the hype around this "Tableau destroyer" in recent months, I want to highlight some fundamental flaws in data connectivity and reports maintenance of Power BI, which the Product Team so far has turned down as "not in scope". In practice, though, this renders Power BI pretty useless for getting dara from any 3rd party products, in the cloud in particular. This review reflects Power BI as of mid March 2017. I have gathered my knowledge from testing, community interaction and a dozen tickets with Power BI Pro Support. The focus lies on getting data via Web Services, much aligned with Microsofts Cloud First Strategy. 1) Power BI Online is in the cloud, but does not allow for HTTP calls. Power BI Desktop allows for HTTP calls, but only with static authentication parameters. First of all, a distinction needs to be made between Power BI Online and Power BI Desktop. While Power BI Online is the "master" that ultimately allows you to share and publish your reports, user experience in design is diminished by HTML limitations (you may know from Word or Excel Online) and more importantly, data connectivity (Get Data) is limited to SQL Servers on Azure and about 20 to 30 plugins from 3rd party solutions at present. Take note that on Power BI Online, you cannot select or manage your Gateways, either. This brings the attention to the Power BI Desktop client. Updated every one to two months, the Desktop client brings data connectors necessary to connect to a larger number of data sources. With the Web connector, HTTP calls been configured, although with just static headers and parameters and Basic and Windows authentication only. Importantly, though, Power BI Desktop includes Microsoft Power Query, which you may know from Excel 2016 already. With M Scripts, you can script and customise in many ways and most interestingly, convert it into table form quickly. This is where Power Query shines. However, Power Query does not seem to call on methods for nonces and timestamps required in token based authentication (OAuth for example). (Should this be incorrect, please please let me know. I have been browsing the fora and nagging Support too long already.) Whats really amusing here is that Microsoft Azure uses OAuth 2.0 themselves. So, you cannot run any reporting on Microsofts Azure AD or Resource Manager database for example, a notorious blackbox. Back to Powershell. (Power BI does not accept Powershell feeds.) In short, while Power BI Online does not allow to get any data out of the web (except for those 20 to 30 plugins, mostly Microsoft Products), Power BI Desktop allows for Web calls, but only with static parameters and thus, basically with your user credentials. Thats a big limitation in Data Connectivity. 2) With Power BI Online being the master, the HTTP calls cannot be scheduled or refreshed in the cloud. Now that you have configured your HTTP call (with risky user credentials), you want to publish your report and have it refreshed on a scheduled basis, say every day. Tough luck. While you can publish your Report to Power BI Online and subsequently a broader audience, its a static image of your Desktop data. You cannot schedule a data refresh in Power BI Online (because there is no Web feature anyway) and you cannot even refresh the data manually as this requires republishing the Report anew. You risk your management looking at outdated data whenever you forgot to republish your report and sneak the new URL into your dashboards and iframes. 3) The On-Premises Data Gateway is pretty useless for Web Services. Yes, there is the On-Premises Data Gateway. Yes, you can configure Web Services in the gateway, although its pretty ironic to route web calls via on-premises infrastructure. But did you ever try it? That is, you cannot specify any HTTP headers fort he calls at all, lest writing a Power Query script. And thus, we are back at authentication via Basic and Windows only and writing REST scripts in the data source for every single HTTP call because with no Headers and Body, all parameters need to be coded in the URI. Will you do that? At the end of the day, Power BI is Microsoft's long overdue acknowledgement that Excel and some Dynamics Reports do not cut it for Reporting purposes. Indeed, for reporting on SQL Server, Dynamics 365 (if you want to afford it), and Excel and Access databases stored in your OneDrive, Microsoft Power BI does a neat job. However, as soon as you want to integrate with 3rd party systems or via web services in particular, Power BI presents so many limitations in authentication, Header and Body configuration, scripting, and scheduling that you need to configure an entire SQL Server environment (on Azure or On-Premises via feature poor Gateway) and write a SQL CRL interface or buy Azure Data Factory to get that data in. For some pretty reports, do you really want to buy and customise all that BI infrastructure on Azure? My advice to Microsoft: Work on Data Connectivity, especially in Power BI Online, rather than more visuals for those limited data sources. Your Microsoft clients will consider Power BI a given for the utter lack of reporting in Office 365, Azure, or Dynamics 365 (yes, pushing it there). My advice to Users: If the connectors are not listed, look somewhere else. (And make sure its your use case that is listed. Power BI announced an Azure AD connector, but rather than reporting on Users, Groups, or Enterprise Apps, you can only see on a nice map where the last logins happened.) Is it a Tableau destroyer? No. Its a long overdue acknowledgement for necessary reporting with the potential of being a solid Business Intelligence solution ONCE focus comes to lie more on data.

Utkarsh B.Verified LinkedIn UserPower BI Developer

5.0

Overall: I am a Power BI Developer and have delivered many dashboards to the client in Power BI. Its Better than other Products. Its Save my lot of time by using Power BI various features. From Importing the Data to Publishing ,Its a easier platform I would suggest you to use. It contains the most trending Visuals in the market that a every developer wants.

Manmadharaj D.Assistant manager

5.0

Overall: There is plenty of documentation available online from creating visuals to advance functions using measures and It is easy enough for a non-developer to use and turn a mess of data into an intelligent and understandable story.

Federico A.Verified LinkedIn UserManagement

4.0

Overall: My overall experience is great, using it to compile, perform ETL, prepare reports and create Dashboards is simply powerful.

Osman F.Marketing Support Manager

5.0

"Share important information through Power BI"

Martha Leah N.Infrastructure

5.0

"Microsoft Power BI review"

oswaldo

4.0

Have nice tools and many ways to get your data into the project. The only thing missing is a way to connect with google docs, hopefully soon.

rolandoisidoro

5.0

Great business analytics suite with a wide variety of data sources to choose from in a fully featured free solution.

80sbush

4.0

Range of data source support and provides a better environment than excel for adhoc power query workflows.

rajeshn

5.0

Microsoft Power BI is a handy tool for both self-service and IT-managed enterprise BI projects.