What is Power BI?
Microsoft Power BI, learn the pros and cons and why you should consider Power BI. As a business professional, you know that data is essential to making informed decisions. But what if you don’t have the time or expertise to analyze the data yourself? Microsoft Power BI can help. Power BI is a business analytics tool that allows you to connect to various data sources, create reports and dashboards, and share insights with your team. It is a powerful tool, but it also has its pros and cons. In this post, we will discuss the pros and cons of Microsoft Power BI so that you can decide if it is the right tool for your business.
What are the benefits of using Power BI?
Ease of Use
Power BI is a fairly easy tool to use. The interface is user-friendly and you can easily create reports and dashboards. You can also share your insights with your team members, which makes collaboration easy. Power BI offers a variety of different types of charts to help you visualize your data. These include cards, bar, line, pie, scatter charts, tree charts, and so many more. You can also create maps and dashboards with Power BI. One of the benefits of using Power BI is its drill through capabilities. With drill through, you can easily explore the data that underlies your reports. For example, if you have a report that shows sales data for a particular region, you can easily drill down to see the sales data for individual cities within that region. This makes it easy to find the information that you need.
Custom Visualizations
Power BI offers a variety of custom visualizations that allow you to easily visualize your data. There are a variety of graphs and charts to choose from, and you can also create your own custom visualizations. This makes it easy to find the right visualization for your data. Plus, the visualizations are interactive, which allows you to explore your data in more detail.
Frequent Updates
Power BI is constantly updating its features to make it easier for businesses to connect to data and create reports. Recently, they have added some innovative updates that make the tool even more powerful. These updates include:
- The Ability to connect to Facebook Ads Data
- The ability to connect to Google sheets data
- The ability to create custom visuals
Data Sources
Power BI accepts a variety of data sources, including Excel files, SQL Server, and Azure, Snowflake, Flat Files, and JSON. You can also connect to various social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. You can also connect to Google Sheets and other cloud-based data sources. This makes it easy to connect to the data that you need to create reports and dashboards.
What are the some of the challenges of using Power BI?
User Interface
While the user interface is easy to use and understand, it can be limiting for users who want more control over their data. It is often the case that selection, bookmark, and filter panes obstruct much-needed reporting real estate, and a cleaner user interface is desired.
User Interface
Valuable report real estate is take up by the side navigation and top menu that has options unrelated to the report you are viewing.
Lack of Control and Governance
One of the biggest drawbacks of using Power BI is the lack of control and governance. With other business analytics tools, such as Excel, you have more control over who can access your data and what they can do with it. However, with Power BI, all team members have access to all data sources, which can lead to privacy concerns. Additionally, there is no way to restrict users from creating reports or dashboards that may not be in line with your company’s policies. This can be a big issue if you are trying to keep track of who is accessing your data and what they are doing with it.
Limited Sharing Capabilities
Power BI has limited sharing capabilities. While team members can easily share insights with each other, it is difficult to share your reports or dashboards with people outside of your team. This can be a problem if you need to share your data with people who are not part of your team.
Costly To Scale
The high cost to scale Power BI can be a deterrent for businesses that are looking for a powerful business analytics tool. The cost of licensing and using Power BI can add up quickly, especially if you need to use it for multiple users. Additionally, if your company grows and needs more capacity, the cost to scale Power BI can be prohibitive. This can be a big issue for businesses that are looking for a tool that can grow with them. As an example, if you have 120 Power BI users you will pay a minimum of $1,200 per month. It doesn’t matter if the licenses are for developers or for report viewers, it’s the same cost per license.
The Podium BI Solution
Podium BI seamlessly connects to your existing Power BI content and has all of the great features you’ve come to love about Power BI with these added benefits.
Reduce Licensing Cost
Our solution is the most efficient and cost-effective way to leverage Power BI. With Podium BI you can share your content with an unlimited number of users and without having to worry about incremental licensing cost. Customers can easily share reports with internal and external users and individual users do not need a Power BI license to view, share, and interact with reports.
Completely Customize
With Podium BI Portal you can change the theme of your entire site with just a couple of clicks. Personalize your site by choosing your logo, splash image, reporting loading image, fonts, welcome text and more. Use one of our preconfigured themes or completely customize your colors to match your companies branding. The only limit is your imagination.
Features
You will have all of the great features you love about Power BI such as bookmarks, exporting, sharing, favorites and additional features such as the ability to embed 3rd party API’s, set expirations on shared reports, add navigation links that display a website Iframe or links to external websites.
Securely Share Content
Podium BI is fast and secure. Our production servers are backed by a 99.9% uptime SLA, cloud firewalls, global data centers, and monitoring. With Podium BI, adding reports and making sure access is only given to the intended audience is second nature because our portal is pre-configured to connect to Power BI and Azure.
Saas Tool
As a powerful SaaS tool, the multi organization feature lets you segment the tool to accommodate different companies or divisions, each with a custom branded site secured to show only the data appropriate to each audience.
Last Thoughts
Power BI is a powerful business analytics tool that has a lot of great features such user friendly interfaces, custom visualizations, frequent updates, and the ability to connect to multiple data sources. However, Power BI also has drawbacks such as the lack of control, cost to scale, and the limited sharing capabilities.
Podium BI is not right for all companies. If Power BI is limiting your ability to share your content due to licensing cost or you want more control over content and have unlimited sharing capabilities Podium BI would be worth checking out. We can deploy Podium BI in minutes and we are currently offering a 60 day no hassle trial with no credit card required.
For more information about the Podium BI Portal please Schedule a Demo