Blog | 10 Reasons why Power BI is right for you

A picture speaks a thousand words. That’s what Power BI does to your data. It transforms one of your most valuable raw assets – your data – into rich visuals and analytics – that is easy to consume.  

While there are many BI tools on the market, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better option. Microsoft’s offering is market leading and can be accommodated in any budget. Here are ten reasons why Power BI is the business intelligence solution you should choose – hands down:

1. It’s the market leader

You deserve the best. And Microsoft Power BI really is the best. But don’t just take our word for it. For 13 years in a row, Microsoft BI has been positioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Gartner consistently rates Microsoft as the BI provider you should choose.

2. It’s the most affordable in its class

Power BI’s competitors all cost at least three times more. For example, Tableau’s Explorer starts at $35 per user per month. Qlik Sense’s Business license is $30 per user/month and the Enterprise license is 40$/user/month. In contrast, the Power BI Pro license starts at $9.99 per user per month and the basic version is even free.

3. It’s easy to connect to your data

Power BI has 70+ out of the box connectors so you don’t need to be a data scientist to start linking Power BI to most of the applications you already have. Microsoft really has taken away the pain of pulling in all of your data.

4. It’s easy to use

Power BI’s easy-to-use interface allows you to import data quickly and efficiently. It allows you to perform advanced transformations and satisfy most data cleansing needs without writing a single line of code. There are many pre-built dashboards to draw inspiration from for your visualisations. You can even use them on your own data.

5. It visualises your data beautifully

With a strong focus on extensibility, Microsoft allows the community to create stunningly beautiful custom visualisations to satisfy any need for data presentation. These all work natively with the standard library of visuals without any additional configuration.

Have a look at the sort of data visualisations Power BI can offer you:

See more examples here

6. It makes reporting a breeze

Gone are the days of laboriously prepping PowerPoint slides or Excel docs at every month-end. All the information you need can be set up as a template and automatically exported into the format you need. Board packs become a breeze. You can also place all your main reports and KPIs into an all-in-one master dashboard. You can then drill down to get granular-level detail – whenever you need it.

7. It’s extremely versatile

Power BI is an enterprise-quality application. As you’d expect this means you can access it whichever way you prefer: via your Desktop, through a web browser, or on your phone/tablet using one of its native iOs, Android or Windows apps. You can then embed reports directly into websites and content packs.

8. It’s extremely powerful

Power BI is built on Microsoft’s Power Platform & Azure infrastructure so it means it has access to Microsoft’s extensive machine learning and artificial intelligence engines through the Cortana Intelligence Suite. Users can create machine learning models directly in the program using advanced analytics languages like Python and R inside the application itself. Computational power won’t be a problem either. For example, Power BI Premium can deal with tables in excess of 100 million records without breaking a sweat.

9. It’s extremely secure

Microsoft is an industry leader in the area of user and data security. With this being an enterprise product you don’t need to have any concerns in this area. User access is managed through your Active Directory and it has all the security layers you’d expect and are familiar with in Office 365. This all ensures that you have the highest data security whether your data is on-prem, in the cloud or a hybrid of the two.

10. It’s probably licensed to you already

While Power BI can be licensed separately, companies with at least an E5 Microsoft Office 365 license already have access to the professional version of Power BI. So, why pay for additional competitor licenses when you probably already have access to Power BI right now!

Want to transition to Power BI?

If you currently use another business intelligence solution we can easily assist you to transition to Microsoft Power BI and get all the advantage of the industry-leading business intelligence application.