In the last few years, the Business Intelligence (BI) world has been moving towards self-service BI. As expected, several vendors created tools empowering regular users to gain insights from their data. Among the many, there is Power BI. Nowadays, users want to understand the differences between Product X and Power BI. One of the most common questions in conferences and user group sessions is likely, “can you provide a comparison between this product and Power BI?”.

The answer is almost always, “No, I cannot compare them, because they are too different”. First, one needs to understand the deep difference between Power BI and most other reporting tools on the market. Only later does a comparison make any sense. As a matter of fact, I think Power BI can be compared to only a few products on the market today. Marco Russo recently published the article Power BI is a model-based tool, describing the technical differences between report-based and model-based tools. I would like to add my point of view to the discussion.

Indeed, Power BI is a tremendously powerful data modeling tool that happens to come with a pretty face; most other products are beautifully crafted reporting tools with a pretty face. The only thing they have in common is the pretty face. If you stop at what they have in common, you are only comparing a small fraction of the whole product, and that would be unfair.

To go further, a deeper understanding of basic BI concepts is needed.

Beware: this article is biased. I love Power BI and I make my living out of it. Nevertheless, I am a BI professional; I started working with Business Intelligence many years ago and I have gathered experience that I can share. I will try to be as fair as I can in this post, as my goal is not to provide a comparison with any tool. The goal of this post is to help you understand what you really need to evaluate when making (or reading) any comparison between different BI products.

At the top level, any Business Intelligence solution is composed of three layers:

  • Raw data: these are the data sources that one wants to analyze. Raw data comes as is.
  • Semantic model: this is where data is re-arranged to optimize it for analysis. Here you also define the calculations required by the reports.
  • Reports: these are the nice dashboards you can build with the tool.

Power BI manages all three layers: you start from raw data, you can build a semantic layer, and finally you prepare reports. Most other reporting tools are focused on the last layer and are limited in the previous two. In other words, they are missing the capability to build a real semantic layer. It is important to clarify what a semantic layer is, to understand what you would miss by choosing a different product.

In the old ages of BI, there was a clear separation between users and developers. A BI developer would build a project to help users extract insights from their data, and build reports. Users did not need to understand tables, relationships, or calculations. The developer oversaw shaping the tables, providing predefined calculations and giving sensible names to entities. Leveraging the semantic model, users did not have to know DAX, MDX or SQL.

A semantic model lets users interact with business entities like customers, sales, and products. Users would place those entities in reports made with Excel or with other reporting tools. Regular users were happy with just Excel and a Pivot Table. More advanced users wanted more powerful tools, and this led to the creation of several reporting tools with their ad-hoc programming language to create more advanced formulas. Regardless, the important thing is that no matter how powerful those tools are, they were still reporting tools based on the existence of a previously crafted semantic model. No semantic model, no reporting.

Picture this: a BI tool lets a developer build a semantic model. A reporting tool lets a user build a report on top of an existing semantic model. You need both to create a BI solution.

Unfortunately, building a BI project takes time. Users were hungry for reports. This led to the start of the Self-Service BI era. Self-service BI is the idea of users building reports themselves, to reduce development time and to build a democratic knowledge about data. Sounds cool and terrifying at the same time.

Anyway, this is where we are today. Obviously, driven by the market several vendors started to build self-service BI tools. A few new products appeared on the market. Rather, existing tools evolved into new ones, targeting self-service BI. Keep in mind: any self-service BI tool requires the functionalities to build both the semantic model and the report in the same tool. Thus, depending on where you start, you have two options to have an existing product evolve into a self-service product:

  • If you already have a semantic model tool, you need to add reporting capabilities. You need to make it easier to use, because the target is no longer a BI professional but a regular user instead.
  • If you already have a reporting tool, you need to add the capability to build a semantic model because your users need to massage the data and build calculations on top of the resulting model.

In both cases, in the end you obtain a tool that mixes the capabilities to create a semantic model and to build reports. After this first step, you can add tons of different features like sharing with other users, building wizards to automatically connect to other services, improving the formula language and so on. But the core is always the same: a semantic model and a reporting tool, bound together in a nice package.

Even though we consider Power BI to be a new product, it is actually the evolution of Power Pivot and Analysis Services Tabular (semantic model), Power Query (querying tool), and Power View (the first version of the reporting tool released with Excel and SharePoint). Other vendors took similar steps, with different starting points. It is fair to say that several vendors started from a reporting tool, adding the semantic model to it.

Now, if you need to compare two BI tools, you need to compare at least these two features: the semantic model and the tools to build a report.

Say you want to compare Product X with Power BI; you show me how easy it is to build a gorgeous report on top of an SQL view, much easier and much more powerful than Power BI. Cool, but you are only comparing a fraction of both products. Reporting-wise, sure, Product X is better than Power BI. But there are other considerations: can you load multiple tables in Product X? Can you build relationships between them? Can you use a programming language to author complex calculations that involve scanning different tables? All these operations belong to the semantic model. A fair comparison needs to apply to all the features.

This is what Power BI offers you:

  • Power Query – a data transformation tool which is easy to use and yet incredibly powerful. It can load virtually anything and join data from different sources.
  • A modeling environment where you can build different kinds of relationships between tables and build powerful models. It does not hurt that it runs on top of one of the fastest databases I have ever seen.
  • DAX – a programming language which is not easy, but lets you author nearly any query and calculation. Yes, on this I am biased for sure!
  • Power BI – a reporting engine which is very good in building dashboards and reports. It can also be extended with custom visuals and third-party products.

Then, there is web-based reporting and sharing, a mobile experience, the ability to load from nearly any data source in the cloud or on premises and many other useful features. Yet, the core is composed of the four features above. If you want to compare apples to apples, you need to compare at least these four parts. Be mindful: you need all of them. A tool that requires you to build a single table because it does not let you relate two tables is nothing but a nice reporting tool. Comparing it to Power BI does not make much sense to me.

Moreover, it does not come by chance that to learn Power BI, one needs to learn new programming languages. Each feature has its own language, and this is just the right thing to have.

M, the language of Power Query, is designed for data transformation from different sources. You might argue that SQL does the same. But if you ever needed to pivot or unpivot columns you know that with SQL this is not an easy task… When with M it is just a couple of clicks away.

The semantic model is based on DAX. DAX is not an easy language, but its complexity does not exceed what is needed to author complex calculations. DAX does not offer a standalone function that computes MOVINGAVERAGEOVER30DAYSNOTCONSIDERINGWEEKENDS. Instead, it provides the building blocks to compute this calculation, and much more. If you cannot compute something in DAX, it is likely you don’t know the language yet. Time to learn it, it has so much to offer!

Finally, reporting. Reporting is only the last part, even though it is the most visible one. You might find other products are better than Power BI when it comes to reporting. This is fine, if you are aware that you are only comparing a fraction of Power BI with the whole of Product X.

I love Power BI, and I would really love to see a fair comparison between Power BI and any other product. We could learn a lot from the topic. But for it to be fair, it cannot just be based on how easy it is to build a pie chart (just kidding! You are not using a pie chart, are you?). One needs to evaluate everything both products have to offer.