Logi Info vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

The pricing of Logi (per server core) is highly attractive for internal-facing use as we can control/predict how many visits we will get to our internal Logi webserver. The fact that the only license required is on the server means that all of our staff can use Logi Info-presented content without restrictions. The option of OEM licensing is also attractive and presents many future options, but will require much more licensing as the webserver will require more cores to handle the level of traffic demanded by OEM usage.

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

• Flexibility and easy standup. Users can choose to create their own Logi application or do a "quick standup" by using design straight out of the box. Due to varied customer requirements, Logi allows the developer to address all needs.
• Great design studio. The studio provided with Logi to create and maintain your Logi app gives a lot of detail and examples to guide you along the way. The tool even includes some additional tools for the layman to assist with deployment or wizards to help you create more complex type reports that otherwise would require more detailed technical knowledge to create. Of course, you can still do anything you want by hand if that is what you prefer!
• Documentation. Logi's developer portal provides plenty of documentation and examples to get users going. Need to create a custom template that builds from a table rather than being hard-coded? Search the documentation and you will find examples to piece together to form your solution!

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

• Support. Logi used to provide EXCELLENT support. However, they've changed their support model and no longer provide excellent help. I used to get problems resolved within 15-30 minutes. Now, it has gone down to 48 hour response time just to answer a simple question. In-depth questions can go on for days or weeks.
• Based upon the change in support, and the fact that we pay for 'unlimited phone support' in our annual contract, we are moving away from using LOGI as a tool for the future.
• Learning CSS and Javascript would make you a better LOGI developer.

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

Logi Info is a very outdated, archaic product that tries to build .NET / Java web apps using an obscure XML-based markup language to implement BI widgets, with a lot of extra CSS/JavaScript needed on your own to make it do the best things. There are many other better tools. It is not a BI tool, and as a web development tool it's not great either. I'd recommend getting some good third-party .NET BI library if you want your web devs to make the reports, otherwise use a proper BI tool like Power BI or Tableau, or even Logi Composer (formerly ZoomData before Logi acquired it.)

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.

I am giving 9 rating because the Logi Info still needs to improve on the tutorials part and make it easy for the beginners. Otherwise, it's a very good analytics tool which offers more than 20 types of visualization. It's predictive analysis feature and easy to embed with technologies make it stand out in the market.

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

Reports are stable and always avaiable when needed.

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.

The support process is bit slow and has a good scope improvement but overall it's good as team is very supportive. They generally take 1-2 days time to respond emails sent to them but some times a delay is also expected. Overall, I did not face any major issues using the service.

Incentivized

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.

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.

We test drove a lot of the big hitters, Pentaho, Sisense, Tableau, Jasper, Spago, Birt, Knime, Power BI and while most of them did a lot of things very well, but none did exactly what we were looking for without a lot of downsides (more developers, bolting on extra modules etc). Logi also was ultra competitive on pricing structure and they truly wanted to partner with us as much as we want to partner with them.

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.

• By embedding Logi in our solution and using the Logi Self-Service Module we can provide this flexibility to our users without requiring custom development work for each new request.
• We succeeded in developing embedded self-service analytics at scale with a combination of Logi analytics as front-end and a Cassandra data lake with Spark aggregation algorithms as back-end.
• We analyze the insurance industry and need to replicate different data formats across hundreds of databases to support multi-tenant (customer) BI reports and "ad hoc" data review on millions or hundreds of millions of records per customer.

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