A High-Level Overview of Power BI — An Excerpt from Our BI Tool Comparison Guide

When paired with a modern data warehouse, implementing a leading business intelligence (BI) tool, like Power BI, can help your organization use your data to gain powerful insights to help you make the strongest decisions for your business.

In this post, we’ll provide a high-level overview of Power BI, including a description of the tool, why you should use it, pros and cons, and easily integrated tools and technologies.

Overview of Power BI

Power BI is a financially attractive alternative to the likes of Tableau and Looker, and it is easy to learn for developers and business users alike. Companies already relying heavily on Microsoft tools may want to add Power BI to their toolkit to facilitate faster and deeper analysis.

Why Use Power BI

Power BI is initially cost-effective, especially if you’re already part of the Microsoft ecosystem. After upfront technical user assistance, business users can easily self-serve to build visualizations and gain insights. However, dashboard collaboration is limited.

Pros of Power BI

• Pricing is more reasonable than other big-name options, though add-on features can bump up the cost.
• Power BI offers row-level security.
• Drill-through pages are useful for in-depth data exploration and decluttering of reports, while cutting down query execution time and improving runtime.
• Power BI documentation is replete with tutorials, samples, quickstarts, and concepts, in addition to strong community forums to answer technical questions.

Cons of Power BI

• A desktop component is required in most instances.
• When working with large datasets, developers will experience some slowdown as they customize and publish reports.
• Row-level security can slow down system performance as Power BI has to query the backend and generate caching for each user role.
• You need to be all-in on a Microsoft ecosystem to maximize the benefits of Power BI.

Select Complementary Tools and Technologies for Power BI

We hope you found this high-level overview of Power BI helpful. If you’re interested in learning more about Power BI or other leading BI tools, like Looker and Tableau, contact us to learn more.

The content of this blog is an excerpt of our 2021 Business Intelligence Tool Comparison Guide. Click here to download a copy of the guide.

Originally published at https://aptitive.com on August 23, 2021.