Straight Talk Review: Yurbi vs. Microsoft SSRS

We recently published an article about the pros and cons of Microsoft SSRS, but how does Yurbi stack up against Microsoft’s server-based reporting platform? In this article, we’ll do a side-by-side comparison of Yurbi and Microsoft SSRS.

• Pricing: Microsoft SSRS is free if you have Microsoft SQL server, but as with any Microsoft product, the word “free” is misleading. When implementing Microsoft SSRS, customers will need to hire a highly technical resource to implement the platform and maintain it moving forward.Typically, we find that small teams using Microsoft SSRS fit well into Yurbi’s team pricing plan. This plan requires an up-front cost of as little as $120 per month on Yurbi’s month-to-month subscription model, which generally ends up costing much less than hiring a technical resource to manage Microsoft SSRS.
• Implementation Time: Not only do Yurbi users experience cost savings in comparison to Microsoft SSRS, but time saving as well. Yurbi is much easier to set up, deploy, and use for day-to-day reporting. Yurbi typically takes a few hours to a few days to get up and running in most environments. Microsoft SSRS requires a much longer setup and deployment time and can take months to deploy.
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• Dashboards: Users are able to build dashboards in Microsoft SSRS, but they’re very limited and not easily embeddable. Microsoft SSRS doesn’t allow users to securely share embedded reports with viewers outside the organization or embed reports into other applications, besides Sharepoint. Contrarily, Yurbi is able to easily embed reports into most applications and provides the option of securely sharing live dashboards with its view-only settings.
• Ease of Use: Microsoft SSRS is a developer tool that isn’t intended for business users, which means it’s very challenging to use if the user isn’t a developer. Yurbi is designed for business users as a self-service, agile BI solution.
• Security: Microsoft SSRS is well integrated into the Microsoft environment from a security standpoint, but multi-tenant or data-level security measures must be set up by a developer when he or she is building reports. Yurbi employs App Shield, which is a dynamic security layer that can be adjusted to specific user roles.
• Mobile Interface: Though it’s available to create mobile-friendly reports in the newest (2016) version of Microsoft SSRS within the Power BI Mobile App, it’s still fairly cumbersome. In order to generate mobile reports, all Microsoft SSRS users must download the app. Additionally, users must build non-mobile reports within Microsoft SSRS and then rebuild them within the Power BI Mobile App in order for them to be accessible on a mobile device. In our model, we’ve designed Yurbi to be 100 percent responsive, which means whenever users access Yurbi on a mobile device via a mobile browser, users do not have to create new reports because they are using the same system. This also means that users do not need to download a separate app.

The Bottom Line

If you are already heavily invested in the Microsoft stack of products and don’t have any strict requirements for your BI solution (e.g. that business users can easily create reports, embeddable dashboard capabilities, easy mobile access, multi-tenant security, etc.), then Microsoft SSRS is a great solution because it’s free and is supported by Microsoft. However, if you are searching for a self-service, agile tool that allows users to easily generate their own reports with multi-tenant security, Yurbi would be a better fit.

Have additional questions or want to see what Yurbi looks like? Contact us or request a demo!