BI Tools – Microsoft Power BI vs. Google Data Studio

Are you looking for cutting-edge business intelligence and data visualization solutions? Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio are gaining pretty much momentum these days. Both are of a kind where one allows you to create customized charts and reports in seconds while the other offers interactive charts with powerful business intelligence capabilities. The following post provides a brief comparison between the two in regards to software development:

• Ease of use
• Complexity and integration
• Reliability
• Pricing

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is a group of architectures, techniques, and activities. BI is a technology-driven process that helps BI consultants transform raw information into useful information to analyze and carry out lucrative activities to assist corporate end consumers in executing their business plans for an expected SharePoint achievement.

BI has a direct effect on the strategic, tactical, and operational business decisions of an organization. BI involves a broad range of tools, applications, and methodologies to make a fact-based decision by following the below chronological steps on the data.

1. Gather the data from inner systems and external sources.
2. Prepare that data for analysis and run queries against it.
3. Create reports, dashboards, maps, graphs, charts, etc.
4. Make analytical results based on the data visualizations.

Importance of Business Intelligence

1. BI has a direct or indirect impact on a business’s operation and profitable decision.
2. BI’s primary goal is to possibly benefit business intelligence tools, including accelerating and enhancing decision-making, optimizing internal business procedures, increasing operating effectiveness, driving fresh revenue, and gaining a competitive advantage over competitors.
3. It is generating KPI (Key Performance Indicators) based on historical data.
4. The BI systems help companies to identify market trends, identify & set benchmarks for various business processes, and spot the business problems that need to be addressed by BI consultants.
5. BI data include historical data stored in a data warehouse, as well as fresh data collected as it is produced from source devices, allowing BI tools to have a data visualization for enhancing the data quality and supporting strategic & tactical decision-making processes without sparing its quality.
6. BI assists in identifying customer behavior and feedback, analyzing company performance with the past, optimizing company activities, identifying market trends, and helping to address any business problems or issues.
7. Initially, data analysts and other IT experts who conducted analyzes and generated query results reports for company users used BI tools mainly. It can be used more and more nowadays, not by enterprises but by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises).

BI Tools

The data discovery, which used to be restricted to sophisticated analytics experts, can now be done by everyone using these BI tools. These instruments offer perspectives into things like growth, solving pressing problems, collecting all data in one location, forecasting future results, and so much more.

There are many BI tools available for BI consultants in the market, and some of them are mentioned below. Keep in mind that these tools differ in robustness, integration capabilities, ease of use (from a technical point of view), and pricing.

In this blog, we will go through the BI tools provided by the two giants companies: Microsoft and Google.

• Microsoft Power BI
• Google Data Studio

Microsoft Power BI

Power BI is a business intelligence platform developed by Microsoft.

1. It is a web-based business analytics tool suite that excels in data visualization.
2. Power BI is a robust, extensive modeling and real-time analytics tool as well as allows for custom development.
3. It is allowed to connect multiple data sources for preparing dashboards or reports.
4. It is providing a user-friendly interface and excellent data visualization capabilities.
5. This software enables customers to integrate their applications and produce reports and dashboards in real-time.
6. As it is web-based, it is possible to access Microsoft Power BI from almost anywhere. It has a cloud-based and on-premises data warehouse.
7. It targets medium-sized businesses and large enterprises.

There are main key parts of Power BI –

• Power BI Desktop – It is a window desktop application to allow developers to build reports and dashboards.
• Power BI Service – It is Online Software as a Service called Power BI Service.
• Power BI Mobile Apps – It’s a mobile application for iOS, Windows, and Android to view dashboards or reports on mobile devices.
• Power BI Server – which allows BI Consultants to publish reports in the On-premise version after creating reports in Power BI Desktop.

Google Data Studio

Data Studio is a BI tool by Google.

1. It allows a user to create a branded dashboard with data visualizations.
2. It is a fully web-based custom software solution that enables you to produce customized graphs and reports in seconds.
3. It is easy to use, customize, and share reports.
4. It’s also designed primarily for consumers and small businesses.
5. It provides almost any widget or visual which the user wants to represent data—for example, Bar, Line, Geo map, etc.
6. Users can also change the logo or image or color/size of the font in the report.
7. Google data studio provides functionality for sharing and permission the same as Google Doc and Google Sheet, so users can easily share this report with another person or configure permission on reports.
8. Users can also configure reports as public web. So, there is no credential required to view this report.

Features Listing

Microsoft Power BI Report Example

Google Data Studio Report Example

Advantages and Disadvantages of using Power BI and Google Data Studio

Whilst in this world, everything has its two sides. In a similar manner, Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio have their own Pros and Cons.

Microsoft Power BI

Google Data Studio

Conclusion

Finally, we have studied two of the most popular BI tools – Microsoft Power BI and Google Data Studio. If there is a limit of cost, then one can go with either the free version of Power BI or the Google Data Studio. Basically, if one is not willing to pay for, have nice and clean data already, don’t need to carry out any data clean-up, combining & merging before visualizing, don’t need to display data from different sources in one chart, etc. then stick to the Google Data Studio. On the other hand, if one expects custom software solutions to perform complex data transformations, is willing to pay, needs to view information from advertising systems outside the globe of Google, etc. then Microsoft Power BI is the best choice.