Power BI vs. DOMO

TaddGibson

i was looking for feedback from anyone who has first hand experience on moving off Power BI to DOMO and the benefits they saw and also the reverse having to move from DOMO to Power BI and the pain that they felt as an organization. I'm not interested in Gartner Feedback or any other Industry comparisons which say all BI Tools are similar and have their own strengths and weaknesses. I really want the users experience who live #DOMOEveryday…..

Interested in any and all feedback - thank you Tadd Gibson (tadd.c.gibson@ge.com).

calvert_schaefer

@TaddGibson are you still gathering feedback for this thread ? If so I'd be happy to connect. I spent 5 years working with PowerBI everyday before my current role which already had a Domo environment.

Jbrorby

@calvert_schaefer I have no Power BI experience and about 5-6 years of Domo experience as a Domo Admin role (gathering the data from SQL databases, bringing it into Domo, building all of our companies datasets) and have been trying to do some research on the internet to find the similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons between Power BI and Domo. We do have a Power BI instance and I have spent maybe 1-2 hours in it. It is very overwhelming and confusing and lots of rabbit holes. I was struggling for 30 minutes on the syntax for a simple concat formula for a join in Power BI.

I think my biggest areas of Power BI is:

-Ability to share datasets (semantic models?) with users so they can build reports off of them

-Ability to create and share reports and dashboards

-Dataset refresh limits

-Any tools similar to Magic ETL? To me the Magic ETL is such a powerful tool in Domo, especially with the constant modification and transformation requests. When I built a semantic model in Power BI, it seems very similar to Crystal Developer where you just drag the joins with a line and I wouldn't know where to begin to do 90% of the things I do in Magic ETL in Power BI.

calvert_schaefer

@Jbrorby the equivalent to Magic ETL in PowerBI is the power query editor. It doesn't give you the visual tile layout like magic but instead it records each step in a list. Instead of drag and drop you select Transformation options from the header section of Power Query. Historically the downside of PBI was the ETL would bog down with a lot of data but with Microsoft Fabric now you can use Power Query on the cloud and create your data model and publish as a data lake ( which also creates a semantic model ) so its much more performant. As Roche's Maxim states, the closer to the source you do something the better performance you get. But I will say the benefit IMO of PBI is the semantic model. Unlike domo which uses sql flat table fundamentals, the star schema allows you to establish relationships which means you need less columns in your tables overall.

• Share datasets
  • this is done in the powerBI web service. You can either share users to the semantic model or the data lake ( if you have fabric ) . Just like with Domo & pdp, PBI allows you to create security groups with Row Level Security
• Create & share reports
  • You can build pbi reports in the web but its a newer feature so I have always uses pbi desktop. When you're ready to share, you publish to the web in a workspace, then can share users to a workspace or an individual report. As for dashboards, in PBI a dashboard is built in web by picking & choosing cards from individual reports and pinning them to the workspace dashboard
• Dataset Refresh Limits
  • in PBI, I believe shared capacity was 8 refreshes a day and premium capacity was 48. I'm not as familiar with the fabric refresh limits as its a newer product and I have only explored it.

As far as syntax, DAX is like excel formulas blended with SQL. It can be hard to learn at first but the pbi forums have great resources. I learned 99% by googling "how to do ______ in powerbi " and an article would come up with screenshots.

Hope this helps