Reveal vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

As a company responsible for people money we have to deal with following challenges every day: Clients who want to track the status of their transfers. Licensing agencies who need to ensure professional standards are met. Internal team managers who need to track client and staff progress to ensure company progression and success. Reveal does a good job as self-service tool enabling the accountable parties to have full access to important insights 24/7. The prebuilt dashboard themes save time and investment as we don’t need to hire a dedicated data analyst. The interactive dashboards give full transparency. The ability to easily create, analyze and report keeps clients, partners and stuff on the same page.

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.

Incentivized

• Ease of Use - Reveal is super intuitive when it comes to creating dashboards. You don't need to be a data expert, which is key for me.
• Sharing - The ability to share across our teams, locations, and with clients is great. We create teams for our different clients and share dashboards there that also are connected to our company dashboards.
• Support and Roadmap - Reveal support has been great. They care about the needs of their customers. They have released 3 updates in the last few months, and they are adding a lot of value.

Incentivized

• The layout of Power BI is very intuitive. Someone that is familiar with Excel and working with Charts and Graphs in that environment will find the learning curve a rather short one to start using Power BI.
• I like the way Power BI fits an assortment of users and how the functionality that you engage is replicated in Excel, that being Power Query and Power Pivot. So what you learn in one tool can be readily applied towards the other which allows you to more effectively apply your training.
• I appreciate how Microsoft is working to develop tools that go a long ways to empowering the end user. Prior to Power BI I would have had to consult with a "BI" professional to develop a dashboard. With Power BI I don't have to consult with anyone, I can work to put together the dash board I want and using a tool set that is really robust and allows me to engage an enormous amount of data. It's provides a great deal of flexibility and the types of data I can connect to.
• Updates...Microsoft is working diligently to keep Power BI current with monthly updates. They do a really good job of listening to the end user, if there is functionality not currently present just give them a month or so.
• Just to be clear, even though it's easy to get going right out of the gate with Power BI it provides plenty of opportunities to create some really sophisticated reporting solutions. With DAX in Power Pivot and M language in Power Query, you are provided with plenty of head room to do some really amazing things in Power BI.
• Training...there are resources across the web for learning and growing your skills and Power BI. And what's even better is the majority of those resources are free.
• Data engagement, when presenting the data to the end user Power BI goes a long way to allowing that end user to engage the data and begin to identify root cause by simply interacting with the graph/chart/data set. It allows for really fluid engagement. Prior to Power BI so many times during the presentation of data we often times ended the engagement with that data with more questions than what were answered. With Power BI, more often than not, the end user is able to get answers to the questions by simply clicking on the data in the graph/chart/dataset to see the details. This tool really does have the capacity to make you look like a rock star.

Incentivized

• There are a limited number of templates, but this is something they say they are working on.
• Cost is reasonable for individual personal use, but prohibitive to small companies looking to embed their services in their own App.
• Responses to emails for support can be delayed, but what else is new?

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

As a developer of the project, I feel comfortable with this tool for its peculiarities: acceptable costs, simple configuration, creation and maintenance of simple reports, fairly complete account management, also, not least, I appreciate the work done by their technical support always timely intervention and, above all, resolutive.
Furthermore, as far as end users are concerned, I found a good appreciation of the proposed reports

Incentivized

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

There's a little setup initially, but it's very simple. I would only ask for a few more options in font size. My iOS app screenshots perfectly, while the Android version is hard to get all the data to show in the field. I typically show total sales and percentage to LY as my primary team reports...as well as seeing how I'm doing versus the other Area Managers.

Incentivized

Usability is great. This product will make most feel right at home. I feel like this question should be asked from two points of view: 1. Creator of reports, Data Models, Views etc: Most Advanced users will still rate the usability as very high. Its capabilities are still robust. However when compared to other Enterprise Class products it will not do many of the advanced application queries. 2. End user, Consumer: All end users will feel right at home. Many will be able to create connections to already created data models and other external publicly available sources like twitter, Facebook, World Health order etc... These connections are then in turn very very easily available to publish to SharePoint and Power BI. It took me a while to understand what I think is Microsoft's strategy. This will handle all but the most of robust needs. Much like many American made cars and my favorite Corvette, Microsoft is fast, has it own break downs from time to time but all of these are really to tolerate when the price is considered and the next one up that can out perform it is three to four times as much money makes this an easy one to still recommend

This assessment is due to the fact that I have not yet found Reveal not available for use. Apart from some problems of development crash, then fixed by the product assistance service, I have not found any particular problems or loss of time caused by the instrument.

Incentivized

Reports are stable and always avaiable when needed.

The pages load rather quickly even in the presence of several elevations in the same dashboard that insist on different data sources and with visualizations that insist on different types of graph. I can only be satisfied with these performances.

Incentivized

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

None in particular, however, would be welcome if improvements were made in the personalization of the prospects and in the connection between them (perhaps being able to transfer the selections present in one prospect to another recalled by the first).

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

I tested these other platforms, but for what we are needing, they didn't have all the features that Reveal does. Reveal allows for more personalization and modifications. The other platforms also didn't have the plethora of templates that Reveal does.

Incentivized

MSBI for my company is a like using a car that has a good balance of features, is easy to use, has good support, and works well with other things or requirement you may have. We specifically chose it because it is one of the promising platform whose support team will never let us down. Plus all the features of MSBI are A1 and productive according to my team's analysis.

This evaluation is the result of the fact that I have not had the opportunity to deepen the Reveal interface with other tools and / or other software, so the evaluation that I am giving follows what I have been able to read regarding the characteristics of the product online.

Incentivized

• We have the best platform for visualizing data for better understanding
• The drag and drop features saves time
• With data from multiple sources, we get the right intelligence to drive our business forward.
• While it is expensive, the benefits outweighs the high cost

Incentivized

• As it came "in the box" with necessary SQL Server RDBMS purchases, the ROI for the BI components are high as there was no incremental cost.
• Has provided standard reporting for most of the organization available via highly formatted PDF or Excel versions.
• Has provided ad-hoc analytics using SSAS in conjunction with Excel.

Incentivized