We performed a comparison between Databricks and Microsoft BI based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Databricks is the winner in this comparison. It is robust, high performing, and received good feedback for its speed.
"Automation with Databricks is very easy when using the API."
"I like that Databricks is a unified platform that lets you do streaming and batch processing in the same place. You can do analytics, too. They have added something called Databricks SQL Analytics, allowing users to connect to the data lake to perform analytics. Databricks also will enable you to share your data securely. It integrates with your reporting system as well."
"The integration with Python and the notebooks really helps."
"Databricks covers end-to-end data analytics workflow in one platform, this is the best feature of the solution."
"The technical support is good."
"It is fast, it's scalable, and it does the job it needs to do."
"Databricks gives us the ability to build a lakehouse framework and do everything implicit to this type of database structure. We also like the ability to stream events. Databricks covers a broad spectrum, from reporting and machine learning to streaming events. It's important for us to have all these features in one platform."
"The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."
"Good CS and administration."
"What Power BI is, is a whole collection of templates of small amounts of data that can be used to do something for a real world project, that can be easily set up and become the business intelligence environment or a data warehouse for a large amount of data, for a real world customer. That's what is remarkable."
"I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"Technical support is quite good."
"The good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R."
"The best feature for me is Power Query. I know that probably sounds strange, but you can't do too much with visuals and reports if the backend stuff is horribly dirty and just bad. But for me, that is absolutely fantastic. I can load the data and do the transformation and be able to load it in a useful way. There are tons of connections, which is absolutely fantastic as well. It's been fairly easy, and it's intuitive."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the visual aspect and the DAX capabilities to virtually do anything."
"Some of the error messages that we receive are too vague, saying things like "unknown exception", and these should be improved to make it easier for developers to debug problems."
"The integration features could be more interesting, more involved."
"Databricks' technical support takes a while to respond and could be improved."
"Doesn't provide a lot of credits or trial options."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"Support for Microsoft technology and the compatibility with the .NET framework is somewhat missing."
"The tool should improve its integration with other products."
"The product cannot be integrated with a popular coding IDE."
"Its price could be better. Its licensing cost is very high."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"Things can slow down if you create too many pages."
"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."
"There is no column-level security in Microsoft BI, and this is a feature that most of our customers are looking for. That is something that should be implemented."
"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case."
"From a scalability and performance perspective and based on my understanding and feedback from end users, there's room for improvement in data processing, scaling up, and leveraging the cloud. That could be an enhancement area for me to look into."
"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."
Databricks is ranked 1st in Data Science Platforms with 78 reviews while Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews. Databricks is rated 8.2, while Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Databricks writes "A nice interface with good features for turning off clusters to save on computing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". Databricks is most compared with Amazon SageMaker, Informatica PowerCenter, Dataiku, Dremio and Alteryx, whereas Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and MicroStrategy.
We monitor all Data Science Platforms reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
