MicroStrategy vs Tableau comparison

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11,770 views|8,427 comparisons
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46,863 views|35,158 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between MicroStrategy and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed MicroStrategy vs. Tableau Report (Updated: May 2023).
710,326 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"MicroStrategy's solution for mobile is very good.""The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good.""The most valuable features of MicroStrategy are user-friendliness and integration with the different data warehouse systems.""MicroStrategy has powerful data security features, which are crucial these days. For example, when users view data in MicroStrategy, they're only allowed to see a portion based on the permissions. When we evaluated other solutions like Power BI or Tableau, we found the security is very poor. They can't help us secure access to the data.""MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic.""It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis.""The simplicity of MicroStrategy is what I like the most.""Has a great semantic layer."

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"I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management.""Its performance is pretty good, and the development time is very low.""The initial setup is simple.""Tableau is good for routine dashboards, and it has integration with Slack, through which it can send you daily updates.""All features are valuable. It is very user-friendly, and it is mostly drag-and-drop. If we have the dataset available, then we can develop any dashboard very quickly.""I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people.""The geospatial maps representation and the visualizations are nice.""The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness."

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Cons
"Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better.""Lacks decent visualization and the process for creating new objects needs to be simplified.""MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people.""Preparation, data loading and data management application is challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics or MMA deployment.""The pricing could be lower because it is costly.""I would like to see more integration.""I would like to see the enterprise version available in a demo or as a trial version.""It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts."

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"Tableau support could be improved.""Many things have to be improved in Tableau. Right now, we make the calculation, and then we get that information. It would be better if business users could do that. I would ask the people at Tableau to provide that option to business users to get that information in one click. It would be better if they automated some calculations. There should be more automation in Tableau. However, there are many things in automation mode, but it is very limited at the moment. We need automation for people who do not know much about Tableau. It would also be better if there were good community support like in Alteryx.""When compared to Power BI, it is less user-friendly.""Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation.""The solution could improve the scalability, it is difficult to make changes.""Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command.""It's not an aesthetic platform at the moment.""The development part should be better. We are putting a lot of effort in during development, so if we face any struggles, we have to find workaround solutions on the internet."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "All BI software vendors' list prices are high. It's about a price that fits the customer's needs. And I think MicroStrategy has some flexibility in its pricing model where we can easily demonstrate a total cost of ownership comparison against any of the other players."
  • "There is no subscription, I am using the free version."
  • "I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year."
  • "The price of MicroStrategy is reasonable."
  • More MicroStrategy Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "In general, if someone is new and wants to learn Tableau, it's around $70 per month."
  • "It is fairly expensive. I have no idea what they paid. We were on an enterprise license, so whatever it is they licensed at the enterprise level is what we paid."
  • "I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure."
  • "We are on an annual license which costs us $1,400 which is very expensive. Microsft BI is less expensive."
  • "For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."
  • "I downloaded the solution online for free."
  • "Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices."
  • "In Indian Rupees, Tableau costs about 30,000 to 40,000 per year."
  • More Tableau Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Guillermo (Bill) Cabiro
    I do use both Tableau and QlikView. Although very different, I really like both solutions. They belong to the new BI generation known as Interactive Visual Analytics. In my opinion, QlikView has a more intuitive interface for regular users or executives that are not technical experts but the development side is a little more complex. Up to version 12 QlikView did not provide drag & drop features. If a user wanted to see something not included in the application the new object had to be created by a power user or developer because Qlikview's scripting has somewhat of a learning curve. On the positive side, QlikView's scripting is a great asset as it functions as an ETL allowing the integration of hundreds of different data sources into the same visual app. Another feature that’s extremely useful is Qlik’s proprietary Associative Model that allows the users to visualize data relationships that exist as well as those that do not. Tableau on the other hand is a lot easier to use for developers, analysts or power users who need to connect, manipulate and visualize data rather quickly. While this makes Tableau a better fit for the more analytical crowd, it may not be as appealing or intuitive to the regular or casual business users as QlikView is. Tableau has full pivot, drag & drop and drill down capabilities that are great for developers or power users. They can rotate measures and dimensions and graph them instantly using visualization best practices as suggested by… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis.
    Top Answer:MicroStrategy licensing is costly when you're rolling it out to 200 users. A license with Tableau costs the same as I pay for two MicroStrategy users. In order to keep costs down, I'm proposing that… more »
    Top Answer:The pricing could be lower because it is costly. They could also provide some features that Tableau offers. Microsoft has development features regarding schema objects and some integrations. Tableau… more »
    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Top Answer:Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    11,770
    Comparisons
    8,427
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    502
    Rating
    8.2
    Views
    46,863
    Comparisons
    35,158
    Reviews
    66
    Average Words per Review
    556
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Learn More
    Overview

    Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

    Product portfoilio:

    MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.

    Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.

    Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights. 

    Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

    Tableau Features

    Tableau has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Tableau dashboard: Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more. 
    • Sharing and collaboration: Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards. 
    • In-memory and live data: Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions. 
    • Multiple data sources: Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data. 
    • Advanced charts and visualizations: One of the key features of Tableau is its wide range of visualizations.
    • Maps: Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries. 
    • Robust security: Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

    Tableau Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Tableau. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Data visualization
    • Create interactive visualizations quickly
    • Easy to implement
    • Ability to handle large amounts of data
    • Use varying scripting languages 
    • Responsive dashboard and mobile support 

    Reviews from Real Users

    Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

    Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.

    Offer
    Learn more about MicroStrategy
    Learn more about Tableau
    Sample Customers
    Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.
    Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Retailer11%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Retailer9%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization17%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise51%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
    May 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about MicroStrategy vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: May 2023.
    710,326 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 9 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 64 reviews. MicroStrategy is rated 8.2, while Tableau is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "Very good solution for mobile". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft BI, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAP Analytics Cloud and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. See our MicroStrategy vs. Tableau report.

    See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.

    We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.