Microsoft Power BI has emerged as a major player in the BI space, and as a result, many of our customers and prospects have asked us to write up a comparison between Yurbi and Power BI. We’ve held off writing this post simply because Microsoft has been releasing so many feature updates, so quickly, it has been hard to stay accurate with any comparison.
In case you haven’t been following the news, Microsoft Power BI is aggressively targeting BI industry leaders, like Tableau and Qlikview, and is starting to affect the success of these companies. Power BI’s popularity has taken a toll on Tableau, which is evidenced by the drop in its stock price and slowed hiring by 50 percent. Power BI is also slowing Qlikview’s growth, which is positioning itself to be acquired {UPDATE: Qlik was acquired by Thomas Bravo for $3 Billion)
However, the hype around Microsoft Power BI is unlikely permanent. DOMO was previously thought to be the conquerer in the BI space but the hype around DOMO has subsided significantly. Similarly, Microsoft Power BI is garnering a lot of attention right now, but there are instances where Power BI isn’t a good fit. In this article, we’ll take a look at how Microsoft Power BI compares to Yurbi.
- Architecture: One of the biggest differences between Power BI and Yurbi is each product’s architecture, which either qualifies or disqualifies each solution for potential customers. One of Yurbi’s major strengths is that Yurbi takes a seamless platform approach, and is installed on-premise instead of in the cloud. When customers purchase Yurbi, Yurbi is installed on the customer’s server and securely connected to their source database. At no point does Yurbi copy data outside your environment. Yurbi can be installed on a single server, is a very light-weight application, and only has 2 Windows Services that need to be running in order for Yurbi to operate (however for larger environments you can separate Yurbi into a multi-tier, scalable architecture). Yurbi is designed to be easy to install, easy to maintain and upgrade, and is designed to reduce the amount of administrative overhead needed to support the product.On the flip side, Power BI has a complex architecture that is both desktop-based and cloud-based. Power BI users access data via the solution’s desktop tool and then publish reports into the cloud. If users have on-premise data sources, they must use Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway, which will sync on-premise data to the cloud database. The Microsoft architecture can potentially include many components including Azure, Office 365, SQL Server Analysis Services, Sharepoint, and many other components.
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- Price: Yurbi and Power BI pricing are both very transparent and affordable. Power BI software pricing ranges from free to $10 per month, per user ($120 per year per user) for Power BI Pro. This pricing is excellent for small-to-medium sized businesses. Additionally, Microsoft attracts enterprise users by rolling Power BI into already-established enterprise contracts and essentially giving it away for free. Therefore, price doesn’t really become a huge barrier to entry for Power BI until customers start looking at the total cost of ownership, which includes all of the consulting, training, maintenance, and support of the product because it has such a complex architecture.Contrarily, we endeavor to keep Yurbi pricing very simple. Our minimum amount to get started with Yurbi is $2,495 per year with five named user licenses, or one concurrent license. Yurbi’s pricing includes everything from the software to installation, support, and security. Yurbi also has guest view licenses, which allow anyone to view Yurbi reports without a Yurbi login. This type of report view is something that Power BI does not offer and actually positions Yurbi at a lower price than Power BI when customers leverage Yurbi’s guest view licenses. In use cases over 100 users, Yurbi can also be more afforable assuming Power BI is not being provided for free via one of Microsoft’s licensing agreements.
- Features: Power BI has been piling on its features. The most recent update Power BI rolled out was data-level security, which is similar to Yurbi’s App Shield. Though Microsoft is putting a ton of resources behind Power BI, we believe that all of the new features within the product are making Power BI increasingly more complicated for users.One of Power BI’s major advantages is its pre-built data connectors to SaaS applications and API’s, which is not a strength of Yurbi. Users will also find that Power BI’s dashboards are very robust, which feature associative widgets and powerful filtering.Yurbi’s strengths above Power BI features include ease of use for business users, report scheduling capabilities, guest view reports, auditing capabilities, ease of implementing security.
- White label/OEM: A few months ago, Microsoft rolled out several features to compete in the white label/OEM market including single sign-on, data level security, and enhancements to its embedded reports. However, Power BI is still tightly tied to the cloud and Microsoft Azure, which makes OEM reporting challenging for users who do not use Azure.Yurbi is typically a better fit for companies searching for a White Label/OEM solution because Yurbi is an on-premise solution and integrates seamlessly with customers’ products via our embedding methods and customization of our 100% HTML5/Javascript interface. Our pricing model for White Label/OEM is also better because Yurbi does not have per user-based OEM fees like Power BI.
- Support: With any Microsoft product, support either is sourced through hired help or consultants. Microsoft is not well known for its customer support and its free support is often insufficient, which is one reason we stopped using several of Microsoft’s Cloud products at 5000fish (they were great products but community based support was insuffient and our montly spend didn’t support upgrading to paid support levels).On the flip side, Yurbi’s user licenses come with robust support at no additional cost because we work to ensure that our customer success team is an extension of our customers’ teams. Our support is available both online and over the phone.
The Bottom Line
In our opinion, if your company is a Microsoft shop and has a well-trained technical team to help support and troubleshoot Microsoft products, Power BI is likely a great fit. Additionally, if you have a team of Excel wizards who are comfortable publishing reports in the cloud, or you need to connect to a lot of SaaS applications, Power BI is probably going to work well. (We do caution companies that are looking into Power BI that the sticker price is not reflective of the total cost of ownership.)
If you are not a Microsoft shop and you are searching for a White Label/OEM solution, a solution that is business-user friendly and easy to adopt, or a solution with robust shareable embedded reports, then Yurbi might be a better fit for your environment than Power BI. The best way to find out whether Power BI or Yurbi is a better fit for your company is to test and do a trial of both solutions.
Curious to know more about the right way to purchase BI software? Check out our newest eBook, Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide Part 1!
We hope this review of Yurbi versus Microsoft Power BI was informative. Now, find out how other popular BI solutions compare by exploring more straight talk reviews.
Have you worked with Power BI? If so, we’d like to hear your thoughts about our assessment. Leave your comments and generate a discussion.
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