Grist vs. Power BI For Office 365 (discontinued)

We came to Grist from monday.com. Grist is a clean layout and not cluttered. The ease of use is great and it's to the point. There are some areas that are not right out of the box easy to use, such as their formulas and python coding. However, they will help you achieve what you need. Amazing customer service. They not only showed me an example of what I was looking for but explained step by step how to get there. Which in return teaches me about their software. You will need some patience for this is not a quick and go type of spreadsheet software. But no worries, it can get the job done. Thank you, Grist :)

If you want to create a visual dashboard or report that utilises various data sources then PowerBI can do this. It is great in that it takes your on-premises data and stores it on Microsoft servers where it can interact with it faster, reducing load on your own servers, while being efficient in what it transfers out. We have found it not well suited if you wanted to publish a simple report to many staff as they may all need a Pro license which can get expensive. Even if embedding the report onto a shared platform like SharePoint, it will not display if the users doesn't have a PowerBI Pro license.

Incentivized

• Provides amazing customer service, help, examples, and explains what they are having you do
• The layout is easy

• Ease of use. Most people have experience working with Excel. If you know how to create pivots, you can use Power BI.
• Data extraction and transformation (ETL). ETL is a joy with Power Query. It is intuitive, simple and a magical experience to transform poor data into something useful.
• Visuals. Power BI is beautiful to behold, especially Power View.
• Maps. The interactive maps are great built-in tools.
• Cost You cannot find anything cheaper than Power BI, unless you want to give it to every user in your company.

Incentivized

• Making the user permissions more obvious on how to use them - They are highly adaptable, but hard to understand how to use them
• Small changes such as auto colouring the choices/toggles options and being able to edit them once set.
• Being able to copy the formatting from one column to the next

Incentivized

• Like many Microsoft products, you can get by with a small understanding of the product, but to truly realize the entire potential does take a while to learn.
• Hooking up SQL databases to the cloud version is a more complex than just querying right into the database from the desktop version.

Incentivized

If I were a small business owner, I would likely use Power BI for Office 365 for the sheer fact that I would get the Office licensing I need, along with powerful capabilities. As a Microsoft Partner, we continue to see Microsoft invest heavily in the Power BI capabilities, and will continue to implement and support BI solutions around this product, as we believe this is in the best interest of our clients.

We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.

Incentivized

as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.

Incentivized

I still have subscriptions to both of the above and use them sporadically. Infinity is less user friendly in terms of copying data and moving around the tables, entering data using the keyboard only as I tend to do on a spreadsheet. For this reason, I tended to move across to Stackby prior to using Grist instead of using Infinity. Stackby works well, and has some features that are better than Grist (Predominantly the powerups that I use, and integrations that I don't). However, Grist is still a level above in manipulation of data using python (or Excel functions too), the ability to use widgets and the table duplicated in a seperate page.

Incentivized

One main competitor of Power BI is Tableau. Tableau has been around longer than Power BI so it can feel a little more refined in areas, however Power BI is catching up quickly. Tableau can be more expensive than Power BI. If you want more features and more refinement, and don't mind extra cost, then Tableau may be a better choice. But if you want something that's integrated with many things in O365, and are satisfied with fewer bells and whistles, Power BI may be the better option.

Incentivized

• It's saved a lot of time in both creating an advertising database and managing it week to week effectively. I had previously created in others that haven't worked, and this does, saving me a good 1 hour weekly, and 5 hours or more each time I had problems with the last ones
• Being able to stay on track with this has meant I'm following up at the right time (advertisers) and keeping a professional manner and not losing business due to missed communication
• Saving me $ from buying a program like Access (or Airtable monthly) and then the learning curve that that has. This has a much easier learning curve to say the least.

Incentivized

• As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise.
• One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual.