Microsoft Power BI vs. SAS Visual Analytics

Microsoft Power BI and SAS Visual Analytics are both data visualization and business intelligence (BI) tools aimed at helping businesses gain insights from business data. Microsoft Power BI has a strong community presence, with an open-source repository of user-created visualizations. SAS Visual Analytics, as part of the SAS suite of products, is an industry standard with strong predictive analytics and data preparation features. 

SAS Visual Analytics is most popular by far with enterprise-level companies, who likely get more value out of the overall SAS suite of business intelligence tools than smaller businesses would. Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, is almost equally popular with mid-size businesses as well as enterprise-level corporations, likely due to its cheaper per-user licensing and integration with the Microsoft Office 365 suite.

Features

Although both SAS Visual Analytics and Microsoft Power BI offer self-service data visualization and individualized dashboards, they each stand out in their own ways.

Microsoft Power BI offers an extensive degree of variety and customization for their visualizations through their open-source repository. The charts offered are professional and granular, making it easy to drill down on specific data points or categories. The software is designed with sharing in mind, making it easy to share visualizations with other users. 

SAS Visual Analytics is commonly praised for its solid performance, especially at scale. It can effectively support many simultaneous users without slowing down. Its data preparation capabilities help users ensure that the data they’re visualizing is meaningful and properly formatted.

Limitations

Microsoft Power BI and SAS Visual Analytics are each powerful tools in their own right, but they also have key limitations that you should consider before choosing one or the other.

SAS Visual Analytics has a more limited set of visualizations than Microsoft Power BI, since there’s no open-source database to pull from or contribute to. Some users may find its visual customization options too limiting.Others found that its tools for generating PDF reports left much to be desired. SAS Visual Analytics also has a much higher price point than Microsoft Power BI, which can be exclusionary for smaller businesses.

Microsoft Power BI’s open-source visualization repository can also be a drawback. Tracking down documentation for visualizations can be difficult, if the documentation exists at all. Beginner users often report that they have a hard time getting started with the software, and there’s a steep learning curve before they’re able to use its more advanced features. It can also take a lot of computer resources, and might run slowly for some users.

Pricing

Microsoft Power BI offers two options for pricing. The Power BI Pro tier is $9.99 monthly per user and includes all of its self-service visualization and BI features on the cloud, with 10 GB of storage per user and a limitation of 1 GB for each individual dataset. The Power BI Premium tier is $4,995 monthly with no additional per-user fee and adds features aimed at enterprise-level BI, including big data analytics and on-premises deployment. It also expands the storage to 100 TB total, with a 10 GB maximum size per dataset.

Pricing for SAS Visual Analytics is available via quote from the vendor.