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Reasons why Power BI stands out from other BI tools in the market

Microsoft Power BI is a self-service BI tool filled with rich, stable, powerful capabilities to serve self-service BI requirements. There are many components in the

When Power BI arrived in the BI market, there were other BI tools out there. The Power BI was able to grow faster and quite popular among the Business Intelligence community. 

The following are several reasons for this:

  • Design simplicity: Power BI has built the way any non-tech user can easily grab the features. Some features, such as Power Query, have already been in MS Excel.

  • Large community support: Power BI has huge community support. Even a user can suggest ideas to be in Power BI.

  • Monthly releases with new features: Power BI desktop and service release every month bundle with new features.

  • Built-in AI features: Cortana integration and ML features like quick insights draw the attention of new users quickly.

As a result of all these great offerings of the Power BI platform, In February 2019, Gartner confirmed Microsoft as the Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platform.

Microsoft Power BI rapidly became popular in the BI market. There are many reasons why Microsoft Power BI is widely used in the market while some other self-service BI tools are out there.

One of the key reasons that Power BI became quite popular is the process of working with data inside Power BI was not completely new to the users who work with data. It had the influence, look and feel of Microsoft Excel. Because people who are already familiar with Excel (as many businesses' data are still maintained in Excel formats) easily pick up this new BI tool. Microsoft was making sure they did not introduce something completely new to the BI market.

Another reason why Power BI is growing fast among the community, its release cycle is very attractive. They release a new update of the Power BI Desktop and Power BI service every month along with the feature release note and video tutorials. This allows users to try-out new features on their own and give feedback continuously. Power BI has opened a separate portal, which you can give raise issues, and give feedback on the product. This allows the wider tech community to collaboratively answer the questions, fix problems, and so on.

With all these benefits, Power BI pricing also was a factor in its popularity. It has a unique pricing model. Power BI is not the most expensive BI tool in the market. You can freely download the Power BI desktop, connect with any offered data source, and start analyzing data and generating insights. In order to share the reports, among others, you need to have a Power BI Pro license. If your requirement is to perform enterprise BI using Power BI, process Big Data sources along with dedicated storage, and computation power, then your choice would be Power BI Premium.

Hope this was helpful.

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