Power BI vs ThoughtSpot

Our researchers ranked products on a whole bunch of features. They include data management, querying and visualization, advanced and embedded analytics, mobile BI, and IoT and location analytics.In our rankings, Power BI scores 87 for connectivity, leaving behind Tableau, Oracle Analytics and Dundas BI. Robust Microsoft technology is one reason, for sure. Besides, intelligent techniques like DirectQuery and easy data modeling make it popular among users.In product reviews, some users mentioned a lag when sharing reports from the desktop to the cloud. For me, the platform was a tad slow to start, but otherwise, it stayed performant for my average-sized dataset.When dealing with sales data, total sales, the top-performing products, seasonality and period trends are common queries. Creating a sales KPI report in Power BI was an excellent way for me to answer them. My CSV files included sales, calendar, products and store data.Connecting to sources is straightforward with Get Data on the home screen and toolbar. Once I had pulled in the data, I clicked on Transform Data and opened the Power Query editor. It automatically detects the data type for strings and numbers but can get confused with dates and currency, which it marks as text. It involved some manual wrangling, but I had it sorted in no time. Read my article on KPI Reports to learn how I did it.But I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker as it’s not a tedious task. I had the same experience with Qlik Sense, but Tableau was way better as it recognizes seven data types — string, number, date, date and time, boolean, geographic and cluster values.Tracking sales over periods required a greater level of detail, so I added new columns to the calendar data — start of month and start of week. Column statistics were immensely helpful in identifying unique, distinct and null values and correcting incomplete records. Clicking on the number of products selling at a particular price allowed me to see which toys sold at that price.Creating a relational data model by defining primary keys is a manual process and seems dated once you’ve used Qlik Sense. Adding calculated measures is where DAX shows its magic. For data workers well-versed with SQL, DAX is a ready-to-go tool they’ll be glad to have in their corner.Creating visualizations wasn’t as intuitive as Tableau as it involved drag-and-drop onto the canvas, and frankly, I felt like I was flying blind. I didn’t feel that way with Tableau, and it’s slicker.Power BI offers a paintbrush tool that lets you define the layout, the card arrangement and the maximum number of cards. You can define the canvas settings, background and headers and determine the filter pane settings. It took me longer to create a dashboard from scratch than it took in Tableau.Some users found the pricing structure too complex. While using Azure data in Power BI for basic queries is free, costs can add up when you go for text and sentiment analysis. With Microsoft Fabric, the pricing complexity is set to rise. Though Power BI is available separately too, you’ll need to rely on Fabric to manage users, licenses and other administrative tasks.About 31% of the users mentioning cost complained about onboarding difficulties, possibly because DAX introduces the complexity of learning syntax. It can daunt non-technical users initially, but guided formulas can make the task easier. That said, I agree with the majority of user reviews that training will speed up onboarding and help your team maximize the investment.Overall, Power BI has many powerful features and will give you value for your money. If you’re not a Microsoft user yet, it’s worth checking out for the baked-in vendor technologies like Azure and SSAS. If you are an MS user, Power BI might be a no-brainer, though be prepared to shell out a little extra for advanced functionality and additional modules.

ThoughtSpot is a powerful and reliable solution with the capability to deep-dive into data with an impressive level of granularity to perform business data analysis. With its AI-powered offering, SpotIQ, this platform enables easy data querying with intuitive drop-downs and suggestions to retrieve relevant business data for analysis and presentation. In addition, users can save and share their queries with other users with one simple click. In-memory data caching makes for faster data retrieval and creation of data visualizations on the fly, though some users feel that the platform should have more formatting options for better dashboard customization. With the capability to transform massive amounts of data sets into real-time analytics in seconds, this platform has a user-friendly interface that affords even non-technical users the autonomy to use data to discover anomalies and trends with minimal effort. Astutely recognizing the latency inherent in moving data between data sources and analytics platforms, the solution now offers direct querying into the in-cloud data warehouse Snowflake via its offering - Embrace. Users praise the pricing model of this tool since the cost incurred depends on the storage space consumed, not the number of users. The solution does have its limitations, though. Quite a few users say that implementing natural language processing (NLP) requires a lot of pre-work and that AI-powered searches can slow systems down. Data models have to be specifically tailored to the platform, which makes them inflexible for reuse. Though the tool is supported by all major browsers, users can face UI or performance issues with using it on Internet Explorer. As uploading Excel files is still the best way to push data into the platform, data import can be time consuming. Users feel that updated technical documentation and reporting tool tips for the dashboard UI could help shorten the learning curve. Deployment can be challenging for small businesses without IT support. Some users who reviewed it based on cost feel that this tool can be expensive for mid-level businesses. To summarize, businesses can leverage ThoughtSpot’s excellent AI-powered capabilities to share dynamic, real-time data analyses with employees and clients to drive effective decision-making within their organizations.