Business intelligence (BI) software is an innovative solution that can retrieve, analyze, and transform huge amounts of data into useful business insights. These tools include data visualization and warehousing, dashboard, and reporting. It enables business owners to establish customer purchasing patterns and marketing trends for sound decision-making based on evidence. Users don’t have to throw away excess data as these can be interpreted by BI software solutions. Yearly and quarterly reports are  more current thanks to BI software delivering data at light speed.

Let’s compare two popular BI software solutions: Power BI vs. Grow. We’ll show you which is more suitable to your business by looking at their features, integrations, and pricing models. You can turn to our easy-to-use Product Selection Tool to receive five recommendations of BI software options from our Technology Advisors that are suitable for your business. It’s free and doesn’t take more than five minutes.

Power BI vs. Grow: An overview

Power BI is a web-based application that uses rich visualization for business data analysis and insight-sharing of small to mid-sized businesses. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and comes with author reports that can be used for reporting. The drag-and-drop tools can be used to publish and share data using the Power BI Service. Users can create and distribute content for free using the Power BI Desktop and share dashboards and monitor key data through the Power BI Pro Web Service for a monthly fee. Power BI comes with a mobile app that allows users to access data from any mobile device. There are pre-built dashboards to help users start using the software in no time.

Grow was designed for medium to large-sized businesses to make business performance visualization and performance-sharing possible in real-time. It takes information from various sources such as SaaS applications, databases, and spreadsheets through a suite of powerful features and tools. Grow eliminates the need for a third-party data warehouse because it imports business-critical data and keeps only the most current and relevant data on hand. Users can build metrics in minutes regardless of their technical background and create dashboards with sophisticated visualizations.

Power BI vs. Grow: A comparison of features

Make use of your data through Power BI’s features:

  • Smart visualizations: Power BI provides tools with advanced data visualization techniques and guided analysis to make reports and presentations compelling. The software is a library of custom visualizations that businesses can manipulate to suit their needs.
  • Industry-leading AI: With Power BI, users with varying technical know-how can build machine learning models, prepare data, and process structured and unstructured data.
  • Natural Language Q&A: Power BI lets users write questions and provides answers and content. This information can be tailored to the user’s visual needs. 
  • Unified self-service and enterprise analytics: The software provides users with a single platform to meet business data analytic and self-service needs. Power BI uses paginated reports, open connectivity framework, application lifecycle management toolkit, and semantic models.
  • Accelerated data prep with Azure: Power BI reduces the time analysts and engineers need for collaboration because the software has an unlimited Azure data lake that simplifies the way users analyze and share huge amounts of data.
  • Content packs: Power BI comes with content packs that contain data models, dashboard reports, and embedded queries.
  • Excel integration: With Excel integration, users can connect Excel for data models, queries, and reports to Power BI dashboards.

Power BI’s other features include:

  • Text analysis
  • DAX Data Analysis Function
  • Custom visualization
  • Print dashboard
  • Location analytics
  • Get Data
  • Self-service data

Grow provides its users with features such as:

  • Reports: The reports interface is easy to use and intuitive and designed for both self-service and standard reports. Users can choose from a variety of graph, chart formats, and score cards that track KPIs.
  • Advanced analytics: Grow can handle complex, large, and siloed data sets. It has predictive analytics to analyze historical and current trends and predict future trends.
  • Building reports: Grow lets users convert data formats into the required format for reporting with ease and accuracy. Users can restructure data fast and accurately.
  • Platform: Users can access their data from different devices for on the go use. The software ensures security is not compromised by granting access based on users, groups, and user roles.
  • Data updates: Grow has the ability to track historical data and metrics in real-time with ease. Users can receive email notifications and reports regarding metrics.

Other features of Grow include:

  • Customizable appearance
  • Security
  • Real-time data
  • Unlimited users

Power BI vs. Grow: A comparison of pricing

Power BI is available in two ways: Power BI and Power BI Pro. Power BI is free of charge while Power BI Pro is subscription-based and perfect for businesses that have self-service needs. It comes with ad-hoc analysis, sharing, collaboration, and publishing and is fully managed by Microsoft. Businesses with big data support requirements, cloud and on-premise reporting, and advanced analytics can use Power BI Premium.

Read also: Power BI vs Tableau: A Data Analytics Duel

Grow has a three-tier pricing plan: Basic, Professional, and Enterprise. Basic comes with visualizations and spreadsheet data insights and is charged monthly but billed annually. The Professional plan allows an unlimited number of users and connects to all Grow connectors. Its custom insights help create data-driven decisions. Enterprise connects to all Grow connectors and third-party ETLs. It is charged per month but billed annually and comes with more complex datasets.

Power BI vs. Grow: A comparison of integrations

Power BI integrates with several popular apps such as Zendesk, Azure, Excel, QuickBooks Online, Salesforce, Facebook, Twilio, Google Analytics, and Github.

Grow integrates seamlessly with different business systems like Amazon S3, Amazon Seller Central, Appraisal Scope, Chase, Chargify, Constant Contact, CSV, Delighted, Bank of American, Basecamp2, Bronto, Campaign Monitor, Callrail, Citi, Appfigures, Asana, Base CRM, Bigcommerce, Chargebee, Church Community Builder, Dropbox, Excel, Freshbooks, GetResponse, Google Adwords, and Github.

Choose the right BI software for your business

BI software should be chosen with careful scrutiny. Look at easy data access and great visualization for reporting. Power BI is ideal for smaller businesses while Grow is more suitable for medium to large-size businesses.

Organizations with huge amounts of data should go with Grow because it intuitively keeps only the most relevant and current business-critical data on hand. This greatly reduces time used for going through pools of unnecessary information. Both software products provide mobile versions. In picking a BI software, business owners should base their choice on the software’s features and not just on popularity. 

Want more BI software options? Use our Product Selection Tool.