Hi Ravenclau
Welcome to the community.
I think it's important to know first that the front end of Power BI is pretty good compared to a lot of other tools on the market. And you are correct to say that the "entry level" licencing is realtively cheap (£7,50 per user per month), which means getting started with a few basic Power BI dashbaords for the casual user is easy.
In my opinion (and I'm sure others will have their own views) is it's popularity is largely down to following:
1. The cost of a licence
As I say above, its cheap to get started and the Power BI desktop version is free, making it an easy point of entry. It's vitally important to understand though that Power BI is not a complete end to end BI platform in itself (unlike Qlik). Many businesses will ultimately find that there are limitations with using "just" Power BI and will inevitably find that there are other components to consider beyond Power BI once BI starts to scale within the business. For example, once Power BI has grown to a certain size, Power BI premium may need to be considered (which starts at around £3,200 per MONTH). I work for a Microsoft Gold Partner so i will always warn my customers that this is a distinct possibility that they need to plan for if they went down the Power BI route for their BI strategy.
2. Familiarity
Many busieness users have been using MS Excel and, to an extent, Power Pivot for a number of years and whilst I personally quite like the front end of Power BI, it still has an excel feel about it. This makes end users feel comfortable with it and it can "take the edge off" when adopting a new tool. One of my Qlik clients once said "Power BI is just Excel with sprinkles on top" and whilst i feel that's a bit harsh I can see why they said it!
3. It's Microsoft
This is sort of the same as the above. Microsoft have a huge product stack and many business take the view that just using one vendor is the best approach. I would disagree with that for a number of reasons which I won't go into here. When businesses are already using MS Teams, Dynamics 365, Business Central etc. etc. then they tend to just "drift" into Power BI as it seems like a no brainer - it seems "cheap" and it's vaguely familiar. This might be the case sometimes, but usually the reason for this is that as they move forward with their digital transformation, they rarely stop and think about their longer term analytics needs and regaularly think if BI as "just reports".
Hope this helps.
Stu
