Microsoft BI (MSBI) Reviews & Insights

Score8.7 out of 10

938 Reviews and Ratings

Overview

Synthesised from 5 reviews

In TrustRadius reviews, Microsoft BI (MSBI) is primarily utilized for comprehensive reporting, data tracking, and strategic decision-making across organizations. Reviewers leverage it to manage performance contracts, generate client reports, and maintain real-time data for scorecards. Its strength lies in processing and organizing raw data, with 40% of reviewers noting seamless integration within the Microsoft ecosystem, making it accessible for existing Microsoft users. User-friendly visualization and reporting features, including templates, are also frequently cited.

While effective for data-driven insights, MSBI presents a steep learning curve and requires significant technical expertise for full utilization, a concern for three out of five reviewers. Some users also report performance bottlenecks, particularly with large datasets, and perceive the overall cost, including licensing and skilled personnel, as a barrier. Overall, reviewers find MSBI a powerful tool for data management and visualization, but its complexity and resource demands warrant consideration.

Pros

Effective processing and organizing of raw data
Seamless integration within the Microsoft ecosystem
User-friendly visualization and reporting features with templates

Cons

Steep learning curve requiring specialized technical expertise
Performance bottlenecks when dealing with large datasets or complex reports
High total cost of ownership, including licensing and skilled personnel

Describe how you use Microsoft BI (MSBI) in your organization. What are the business problems the product addresses and what is the scope of your use case?

From 5 reviews

Summary

Microsoft BI (MSBI) is primarily utilized by organizations to address business problems related to comprehensive reporting, data tracking, and strategic decision-making. Four out of five reviewers leverage the platform to manage and monitor performance contracts, including generating weekly reports for clients and maintaining real-time data for client scorecards. A significant portion of the user base, 60% of reviewers, also employs MSBI for data analysis and visualization, creating internal and external dashboards to share insights across business units. This capability extends to supporting strategic decision-making by providing a high-level view with the option to drill down into specific details, a feature highlighted by 3 out of 5 reviewers. The integration of multiple data sources further enhances its utility for deriving actionable performance metrics.

Reviews

77 Reviews

Microsoft BI (MSBI) maximized our business and product management.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft BI (MSBI) facilitates my data analysis for strategic decision-making within the sector and the corporation as a whole, allowing me to easily connect, process, and share insights among team members or across departments.

Pros

It facilitates the analysis and processing of raw data.
It helps us to have a clear view of internal KPIs.

Cons

Microsoft BI (MSBI) facilitates the analysis of our customers' preference data.
It assists in corporate decision-making, since Microsoft BI (MSBI) allows us to compare revenue and production data quickly and easily.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft BI (MSBI) is very useful for analyzing raw data and comparative performance data of our products.

Jessé Paixão

Analista de operações de TI in Information Technology at Flex Contact Center (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

Power BI: Swiss army knife in data visualization

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 21, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Power BI in our case is used like a glorified dahsboard, allowing us to integrate data from multiple sources. It gives us the ability to start at a 100 mile high view for quick infromation, and then the ability to drill down to the single digit, making it very conveniant to drive outcomes.

Pros

Dashboard
Integration with Microsoft Data Sources
Data Drills
Quick templates

Cons

Would love to see Microsoft develop more plugins into 3rd party systems for faster and more secure connections.
Would love to see the desktop developer app go away and take it into the cloud to manage and publish.
Would love to see the solution evolve more, maybe with CoPilot making it more end user friendly, for less reliance on IT intervention.

Likelihood to Recommend

Dashboards are very beneficial in many industries, especially in manufacturing where you can look at sales data trends to help to identify manufacturing quantities for on hand sales to reduce overmanufaturing, long term storage, and reduce labor overtime where in the past you underproduced. This being one example, but could be used to provide quicker data outcomes for quicker outcomes in decision maiking.

Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

12 years of experience

Improved Reporting and Accountability with Microsoft BI (MSBI)

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 14, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Microsoft BI (MSBI) to help us build both internal and external dashboards and data visualizations to share out across our different business units, teams, and stakeholders. The tools that we build using Microsoft BI help us manage and track the progress of certain performance contracts that we have with clients. We need to report on how these contracts are performing on a weekly basis to our clients and we utilize Microsoft BI to do this reporting.

Pros

Microsoft BI has a robust set of standard visualization templates and tools that are easy to use. No advanced technical or programming skills are required to starting use these.
If your company utilizes Microsoft, then it is very easy to start connecting data to Microsoft BI. It was built for the Microsoft environment.
Microsoft BI has lots of documentation, guides, and support due to it being a Microsoft software. Because of its popularity, it is very easy to find people that are experienced with it and can offer support in how to use it.

Cons

We have struggled to utilize it where the manual inputting of data is sometimes needed. It is more a tool for automated pulling of data and does not make it easy to manual input info
It is not really a tool for one-time, infrequent, or simple reports; it is better for reporting that needs constant, consistent, more complicated updates.
It is difficult and challenging to share dashboards and reporting outside of our organization. We often have to come up with workarounds to share externally.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Adam Montgomery

Partnership Manager in Sales at CLEAResult (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

great product

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 17, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using it for building a report portal.

Pros

It reads data from MS SQL Server datamart and displays on reports
we can control user access on this tool
we can also create cubical aggregations of data metrics using this tool.

Cons

we are able to do what we want to do

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited as a report portal tool.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

Good tool for analyzing your office working data with real time sharing.

Rating: 10 out of 10

April 11, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It was short tenure that i used on trial basis. I used for managing & tracking my client job openings, individual performance of my team member, tracking all the rejections. It really helps to maintain all data in real time where i was easily able to track about overcall our performance metrics to maintain the client score card ratio.

Pros

Data Management in real time where you can connect to other data sources very easily. I got 5 team member who were making their day-to-day excel sheet of their working activity and with the help of MSBI, I was able to merge all the data at single platform and was able to remove duplicate entries and to track repeated positions. It really helped to understand where we were lacking and where we need improvement on our performance.

Cons

As mentioned, i had a little used of it for a month only so i am not sure if i had any issue with MSBI.

Likelihood to Recommend

Again, data management, tracking all the activity, merging duplicate profiles etc.

Von Varun Pasan

Sr. Account Manager in Human Resources at Pinnacle Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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MSBI : a new boom in the digital world!

Rating: 9 out of 10

January 4, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use MSBI specifically for data generation and data analytics. It has helped me to create a data way more simpler and easy to understand. It improved the frequent usage of dataflow by more than one user and it has helped me to use and distribute each leads or data to other employees. It helped me build impactful connections through social media and other digital platforms.

Pros

It managed our projects and maintained reports and dashboards
It provided correct real time stream analytics which helped us to make necessary business decisions
It helped built the most attractive and smooth UI designs for our website

Cons

MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones)

Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.

Verified User

Administrator in Sales (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

"Microsoft BI is a powerful analytic tool for large data sets."

Rating: 9 out of 10

December 6, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft Power BI is a beautiful and powerful data visualization tool that we use. It is a robust business analytics tool with excellent visualizations. Excel files, OneDrive, and third-party tools like SQL databases are all supported. We can use the Query revised feature to edit and transform our data, accessible anywhere. It makes it simple to import data from Excel or other sources. Many options are available for visuals, including custom visuals added to any report. With these data visualization charts, real-time automation is possible. For non-technical users, the Power BI desktop has the best part: it is simple to use. Basic visualizations can be created using a variety of drag-and-drop options. Microsoft Power BI has been fascinating to observe how visuals interact between pages.

Pros

Easy customization of workspaces for different project groups via a dashboard and a drag-and-drop interface.
Easy report generation and data attribute comparison across applications. Perfect for data-only devices.
Visual Studio integrates database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development. Large technical user community and rich tool feature set.

Cons

Costs are high compared to the competition, and it could be more user-friendly.
As a browser-based app, it doesn't have as many eye-catching charts and graphs as some others, and some browsers are better than others at running it.
Most of the tasks require a pro version, and proper training is necessary to use it, but you can learn how to use it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft BI works well with Microsoft's ecosystems, especially SharePoint and SQL Server. Even large, complex datasets can be manipulated and turned into useful information. The platform's lists feature can fill any relevant data gaps when used with SharePoint. Its user-friendly graphical user interface makes it simple to quickly and efficiently display data. Aside from that, the reporting tools are first-rate.

Al Mubassir Muin

Software Engineer in Information Technology at Prime Tech Solutions Ltd. (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

In the world of data visualization, this is one of the best virtualization tools

Rating: 9 out of 10

November 13, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

With Microsoft BI (MSBI), we can create our own data sets, goals, and records with no difficulty. We have a wide range of options and features to choose from when it comes to sifting through vast amounts of data. Our organization uses its interactive and engaging layouts are the most impressive feature. This tool makes it simple to view and determine data. This site’s design is excellent, allowing us to see what would have been hundreds of lines of text in graphs and tables. To generate comprehensive documents, we adopt it to figure out large measures of SQL, Excel, and other application-related data. We use it to help our clients make more informed business decisions that lead to increased revenue.

Pros

An end-to-end solution that connects multiple data sources and a single vendor is ideal.
Excellent tools for visualizing data. Using Visual Studio, I could develop database, ETL, reporting, and analytics projects all in one environment.
Easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, with powerful analytical and trending tools and easy access to our data and views.

Cons

It has limited visual options, and Microsoft BI (MSBI) isn't the best for advanced modeling and analysis.
Excel proficiency is required before diving into PowerBI, and reshaping and reorganizing data is possible but not easy.
Additional training and tutorials for Microsoft BI (MSBI) would be helpful for organizations with a large number of users and better pricing options required.

Likelihood to Recommend

Microsoft BI excels at presenting complex and large data sets in a manageable and informative manner. This program's user-friendly graphical interface makes it simple to view data. Other than that, the reporting features are above average for this type of software. It's widely used with Microsoft products, but it doesn't work well with other programs. With limited physical resources, the free version is recommended for minor data work.

Aononna Tazin

Customer Relationship Management Specialist in Information Technology at Green Light Ltd (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

"Easy To Use BI Platform With Effective Reporting"

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 1, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I can connect to Oracle, Snowflake, SQL Server, Excel, CSV, text files, and create custom visualizations with Microsoft Power BI Desktop. Our team can generate reports and analyze data with all of their BI tools at their disposal (SSAS SSRS and SSIS). The best feature of Power BI is its appealing and interactive layouts. Power BI simplifies visualizing and interpreting data. It is possible to use drag-and-drop relationships and data visualization with the Microsoft BI stack to solve many client data problems. Anyone, regardless of skill level, can get up and run with their first project, even with no prior knowledge of SQL. We’ll assess various options based on the client’s licensing agreements. The Microsoft BI stacks are the best choice.

Pros

Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Cons

Only the pro version allows me to complete most tasks, and there aren't many options for customizing the interface.
Browser-based, so some browsers won't work, and the price isn't as competitive.
It doesn't have as many visually appealing graphs and charts, and it's not as intuitive to use as some others, but we can get used to it.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Microsoft BI suite of tools, which comprises tools from the SQL Server suite, provides end-to-end features and functionality for businesses of any size. Users who need dashboards and reports fast will benefit from this tool. It’s simple to connect to databases, cloud storage systems, and CSV files of any type. This makes the dashboards suitable for a more rapid presentation workflow because we can easily incorporate them into PowerPoint presentations. Enterprise and standard editions are both available for some tools.

Nilufa Hossain

IT Specialist in Research & Development at Lamda I-TECH (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Microsoft BI

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 3, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Microsoft BI being used by Master Data Management team like Vendors data, Customers data, Sites data, Bank, Bank Accounts, Customer Mandates, Employees, and Products data within our organization. It solves the problem of master data attributes like payment terms, tax codes etc., discrepancies within the applications of our IT landscape.

Pros

Dashboard capability.
Comparison between data attributes of various applications.
Data load through Excel.

Cons

Integration between different data sources and MSBI.
Dashboard features.
Performance.

Likelihood to Recommend

Shyam Agrawal

Business Systems Analyst in Information Technology at NetApp (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Loading Reviews List....

"Easy To Use BI Platform With Effective Reporting"

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 1, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Cons

Only the pro version allows me to complete most tasks, and there aren't many options for customizing the interface.
Browser-based, so some browsers won't work, and the price isn't as competitive.
It doesn't have as many visually appealing graphs and charts, and it's not as intuitive to use as some others, but we can get used to it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Nilufa Hossain

IT Specialist in Research & Development at Lamda I-TECH (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile