We performed a comparison between IBM Planning Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, and MicroStrategy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan, Oracle, Jedox and others in Business Performance Management."The tool is flexible."
"Navigating through the data to make analysis is really quick."
"A lot of the platform is in-memory, so Planning Analytics can run calculations quite fast. It also offers several user interfaces. And in the newest version of Planning Analytics, there is a new one called the Planning Analytics Workspace. Maybe it could be useful for the business side."
"It's a very stable, robust product."
"Planning Analytics' best features include automatic updates and slicing."
"The ease of use is valuable. The fact that it's plugged into Excel spreadsheets is also valuable. It provides additional functionality where you can slice and dice the information in a way that you can't do with spreadsheets"
"The product's stability is good."
"The flexibility of IBM Planning Analytics is a great feature of this solution. The design flexibility with data rules and defining calculations The ability to combine online and offline calculations are a benefit. Additionally, the forecasting features and predictive analytics is very good."
"The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics."
"Power BI is more powerful than other tools because it is new for us. Each new version has more capabilities, and we're expecting AI and ML features in the next version."
"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"It is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow."
"The interface is very easy to use."
"The initial setup is simple to do."
"Considering that it's Microsoft, it can be integrated with the Power Platform, which is also Microsoft-based, like SharePoint, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, which is the most user-friendly."
"With all the APIs it's very scalable."
"It's useful if you need to create dashboards that you check every day. Also, we can create a queue, but it will be updated every day with scheduled updates."
"It is very stable."
"It is scalable and integration-friendly."
"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."
"Provides seamless integration between browser-based BI and Mobile BI."
"The drill-down functionality is also very good."
"It definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it."
"Extracting data is a little slow."
"It is a bit expensive, but it does the job."
"The tool should include features for prediction. It can also improve the scalability."
"It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality."
"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Adding predefined templates could be beneficial."
"Planning Analytics could be improved by adding automation features."
"It would have been better if the solution was not just a tool kit."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."
"Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium."
"The DAX features need some improvement. It's not as easy as Excel. They need more DAX formulas."
"Areas for improvement would be the construction of reports and the dashboard budget."
"It should be more user-friendly. There are very small or tiny icons that you need to move very carefully. If you go a little bit up and down, some of the values change. Its user interface should be improved. It should be like Tableau. Its performance is also slow and should be improved. I definitely feel some sort of speed issues with Power BI. The integration of Excel with Power BI would also be good."
"Actionable insights could be better."
"When we have a big report with lots of data, the solution slows down quite a lot."
"It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy."
"I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there."
"The In-Memory Capability (cubes) needs a lot of improvement."
"The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space."
"We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do."
"Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem."
"They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that."
"You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document."
