MicroStrategy Reviews

Create and share reports and dossiers, included mobile application

It is first full BI solution in our company, desighnted and administrated by BI department wo internal companyes 

I cannot say that MicroStrategy is a very good solution because it's not simple for the administrator. It is very simple for the users, though. In version 11, we had a lot of bugs and a lot of problems. But in 2020 we migrated to a new version, MicroStrategy 2020, and now we have no problem with this solution and it works very well.

In my opinion, Power BI and Microsoft servers are more powerful and cheaper than MicroStrategy. But only MicroStrategy has a solution for mobile phones. Actually, not only MicroStrategy, but MicroStrategy's solution for mobile is very good.

For example, all our top directors and board members only use the mobile version. Of course, we have some problems between iPhone and Android versions. It's not simple to build one report for two mobile decisions. Of course MicroStrategy works perfectly on an iPhone, but with Android we have some problems because there are different Android versions and mobile phones.

So now we don't want to migrate to something else, so we will stay with MicroStrategy, and our plan is to migrate to the cloud version or update to MSTR 2021 Enterprise solution.

In terms of what could be improved in MicroStrategy, it does not have enough variance of visualization for building dashboards, etc. and I need to buy a custom visualization from  different companies. It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts or if more visualization options will be added in future updates.

3 years totaly and 1 year on version 2020

We haven't had any bugs with the latest version of MicroStrategy.

We have limitations with MicroStrategy, but the limitations are from our servers because we have a lot of users, and a lot of reports, and of course we need the most ability from the system and from servers because we need to have a lot of memory and a lot of CPU. For example, every Monday at 9:00 in the morning, all our users, maybe 300 users, are running a lot of reports. It's not good for the system, but the system works. At the moment it is very hard for the servers, but MicroStrategy is a very stability system.

I don't have any down times. Of course, our decision to migrate to the cloud version is because I don't want to administrate the servers. It's not my problem. I want to administrate only MicroStrategy for users and reports.

I have not had any contact with tech support. We have our own team within our company for maintenance because we have one ticket to date that is open with the support team and we don't have answers for one week. I don't understand what's happening at times. But through this I can review the report or receive my problem. So of course I want to have an answer immediately.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

MicroStrategy is comparable to Power BI, Tableau or Qlik. There is no big difference.

But there is a difference in price, in cost. With MicroStrategy I need to buy licenses for the users only once. Whereas for Power BI, I need to pay every year or every month.

I really recommend the Power BI, but if I were to go to another company, and change my work, today I would want to continue working with MicroStrategy. I really recommend it.

At the moment, we have received some cases to log in with MicroStrategy for education. It is a big plus of MicroStrategy's that we have this possibility. MicroStrategy sites have a great  education part, with a lot of meetings, a lot of video, etc...

On a scale of one to ten, I would give MicroStrategy a 10.

MicroStrategy is used for many uses cases. All BI cases.

For the organization, I am generating reports on revenue, fraud, collection, bad debt, vendors, and customers. I am doing a netting process between them.

I'm currently using MicroStrategy for all of the larger-scale financial treatments.

We use it in many cases for financial reporting.

MicroStrategy is also, used to generate inventory, and asset management reports for the end-users. 

The simplicity of MicroStrategy is what I like the most. It is more simple than other solutions.

It is very user-friendly.

The tool itself is very simple to use, from file creation to using the tool, generating reports, and making changes.

I would like to see the enterprise version available in a demo or as a trial version. It is the companies policy that we are not permitted to use any cloud solution in my company unless it is owned by the company, because we provide cloud solutions for others unless it is not provided. It comes down to enabling R&D for any individual.

It would be helpful to have an Enterprise version for non-enterprise organizations, for people like me who are trying to conduct test studies. As we are self-dependent study persons, my colleagues and I are required to do them. 

If I want to do something between myself and my colleagues, I have to go to my company's premises and use the companies resources. They allow us but it is frustrating because I can't do this if I'm doing something personal.

I started with MicroStrategy in 2011. I have been working with this solution for ten years.

It can be deployed both on-premises and in the cloud.

We are normally working with the latest version, and we update the solution when they are available.

Versions at the enterprise level are managed by the infrastructure. I only manage my personal desktop.

MicroStrategy is a stable solution. It is their strongest point.

The CEO of MicroStrategy usually has his own conference here and comes in personally. We have discussed many features and other topics with him. I believe they are focusing on this. And this is where they excel.

MicroStrategy is a scalable product.

I am not sure how many users there are in the organization, but the organization is very large with thousands of people.

I have never contacted technical support.

We are also using Qlik, and Progress on another project.

We use many solutions. We generate a large number of reports from the data warehouse and populate them into tables. In addition, I'm creating some reports and views, as well as self-service BI reports in some cases, for the end-user.

Aside from the enterprise, we have two projects with Oracle and SQL databases for inventory and asset management.

The initial setup is very simple. It is very user-friendly, very easy.

The personal version is completely free, but the enterprise version requires a company profile or a company email account, and I have to pay for it. If I am trying to do a test study or test case at an enterprise level, I am not able to do it on my own, I would have to use my company's resources, which is a bit costly.

There is no subscription, I am using the free version.

Tableau and MicroStrategy are certified in our environment.

I use it both on my own and in my organization. Tableau and MicroStrategy are both certified and deployed in the organization.

I would recommend MicroStrategy over Tableau.

I would rate MicroStrategy a nine out of ten.

I work for an airline and we are customers of MicroStrategy. 

The MicroStrategy semantic layer is a great feature that I haven't seen anywhere else. I also like the mobile applications that we're able to build with MicroStrategy's apps. The solution has very good all-round capabilities. I've implemented the HyperCard feature, introduced a couple of years ago, for embedding tags in my emails. It enables users to roll over a detail in the email and they can see airline performance. MicroStrategy is also excellent at providing connectors.

MicroStrategy needs to work on visualization and get closer to what Tableau or ThoughtSpot provides. They need to simplify the process involved when new objects are created. It currently requires updating the schema which takes time. In the next version, I'd like to see the inline processing of Python script that Tableau has and it would be great if they could introduce the Natural Language Processing feature that ThoughtSpot has implemented. 

I've been using this solution for four years. 

The solution is scalable but time consuming. If I want to add an additional node into MicroStrategy it takes some time. We have around 200 MicroStrategy users. 

The customer support is great, I always get a timely response. 

Positive

The initial setup is simple. I use an on-prem implementation for all these tools and it's straightforward, particularly for a single note cluster.

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 we use the data connector for MicroStrategy in Tableau. The company wants to move to one tool but I think we should keep the bare minimum of MicroStrategy with the semantic layer working with one or two architects and a few power users and expose the data connectors to Tableau so that the end-user has one tool, but we have two tools on the backend. 

We're probably going to move towards the MicroStrategy professional license scheme which provides flexibility and discounts.

We also use Tableau and I've had experience with ThoughtSpot. As a backend guy, I like MicroStrategy. As an end user, Tableau has a crisper visualization with a better color palette. On the other hand, Tableau generates a huge amount of log which is time-consuming to go through. That aspect is simplified in MicroStrategy where I can go to one place and see the error. Tableau doesn't provide any service unless you purchase their premium-level support whereas I have MicroStrategy on speed dial and I can call at any time to get help. On the other hand, everything has to be defined with MicroStrategy which is difficult whereas in a solution like ThoughtSpot, it's just a case of ensuring that all the keys are defined. The same thing that took a month to do using MicroStrategy was completed in three days using ThoughtSpot.

I recommend MicroStrategy for anyone looking at an enterprise-level solution. If an organization only requires localized reporting, they should go with Tableau. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10. 

It is basically used for higher reporting purposes, such as process digitization, retail, bookings, inquiries, etc. We only used it for a PoC.

We were using the latest version available at that time.

The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good.

It was interactive. Building the dashboards was pretty straightforward. It didn't take me much time to learn.

It was also secure. We were using it on-prem and, integration-wise, it had options for various data sources. We could connect with different databases, which was an advantage of this solution.

The collaboration feature, which was separately licensed, was also good. The hyperIntelligence feature was also good. They give you custom cards where if you hover over any web content, those terms would appear in your report, and then it'll give you a quick summary of the KPIs around that word. I really liked this feature.

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.

I used it for around three to four months. I was involved in a PoC, and then I had to step aside. I'm currently not involved with MicroStrategy.

It is most probably stable because I did not face any problems with it. I had very limited experience with it, and I did not face any issues.

It is scalable. It is on-prem, but they have cloud features as well. 

We had about 300 to 400 users.

Their tech support was pretty good. They responded pretty quickly to all issues. 

I was not involved in any of the admin processes. We have a team of 10 to 15 people for deployment and maintenance.

It is a licensed product, so we need to pay for it, but I'm not aware of the exact pricing and comparisons.

You need to explore and see if it fits your use case. You need to explore its data modeling features and then decide whether to go ahead or not. You should also compare it with other solutions, such as Power BI, and take a call based on your requirement. It integrates with different data sources, but I could not explore the data modeling features.

I could learn it quickly. I had read the comments that the learning curve is steep, but it was not so bad.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic. 

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.

If you have a skilled individual to make sure all the settings are correct, it is stable. Once the setup is configured correctly, it's a very stable system.

MicroStrategy is scalable. It's built for enterprises.

MicroStrategy support could be more responsive. About 10 or 15 years ago, they were winning technical support awards, but I've not seen anything like that in the last few years. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement in their technical support.

If you have the right skills, it's not a difficult process. However, as environments change and become increasingly complex, it's harder to keep everything aligned on the administrative side, especially in large institutional settings. It's challenging to keep the backend administration of the system in line with those changes. Larger organizations have complex environments that the technology needs to interface with. So that's where it gets complicated. 

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. But you could do that from any BI vendor's perspective.

I rate MicroStrategy nine out of 10. Doing business with MicroStrategy is relatively challenging because of the processes that are involved. But the technology is probably the best in the market overall. I think they could add a lot more graphs and charts into their standard product. At the moment, you have to go to third parties to get some of the latest charts and graphs. 

I would recommend it. But if you're going to implement it, you need to invest in educating and training your employees on the product because it is complex. Data literacy today is a big topic, so companies investing in BI technologies should also invest in promoting data literacy among the staff who will be accessing and consuming that information. Right now, most of the training goes to BI professionals. However, companies should also train people who need to consume the data coming out of those departments.

MicroStrategy is helpful for all aspects of the company's operations, including accounting, marketing, and human resources. It's an on-premises solution, but we are looking into migrating to Azure, but it won't be this year. We are looking forward to it in the future, but not at this time.

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.

I would like to see more integration. 

We have been using MicroStrategy for 12 years. My company is French, so we use MicroStrategy for business intelligence because it's not an international solution. It's a French solution.

MicroStrategy is highly stable, and the security is okay. We have a few MicroStrategy servers, a dispatch log, and a load balancer, and we can add more on-premise solutions and servers to improve the performance. We are considering making a switch to an Azure solution eventually but not right now. We can tweak MicroStrategy's performance, and the load balancer works well.

MicroStrategy is scalable. We currently have 7,000 users, but we are changing the use case and plan to grow to 20,000 users over the next two years.

We have a regular call with MicroStrategy support once a week.

MicroStrategy is easy to set up.

MicroStrategy helped us with the migration. We didn't do that alone. The MicroStrategy team is 10 persons, including one leader and eight or nine engineers.

We pay annually for an annual subscription, and we renegotiate the price periodically. I don't know if it's cheaper than solutions like Tableau or Power BI. I don't remember comparing the cost. It's okay for us because we have a lot of users, and MicroStrategy gives us a reasonable price.

I rate MicroStrategy eight out of 10. We've tried other solutions and we're sticking to MicroStrategy. We started using MicroStrategy in 2010, and we've looked into switching to another solution twice, but both times our procurement department has found that MicroStrategy is better. It's a great tool.

We use it for statistics for our customers.

The solution makes it easier for self-service.

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 is more user-friendly, and MicroStrategy could improve specific visualizations, short card metrics, graphs and functionalities. In addition, it would be good to have year-to-year comparisons using transformations.

We have been using this solution since 2007. We are using the latest version, and we always update the versions. We use on-premises and are currently shifting to Google Cloud Platform.

It is a very stable solution. However, the tool could have easier optimization. We are used to creating cubes, but if the query is too large, our administrators in the databases abort the query. That is why we need to be able to optimize and have a good response time.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is helpful. They are testing some issues regarding the metadata when one of the columns gets duplicated. They take the schema for us and divide it. It takes a while, but they help us because it is hard for us to do it ourselves.

Our clients use Tableau, QuickView and PowerBI, but we use MicroStrategy at our company.

Our infrastructure department takes care of the implementation. There are some drawbacks to the shift. MicroStrategy is also scaling.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis. In addition, it offers some features that are better than Tableau and Data Studio.

Our company does business intelligence recording.

The hyperintelligence is the most valuable feature.

Preparation, data loading, and data management application are challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics, or MMA deployment.

We have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

MicroStrategy is very stable.

This is a scalable solution. We have 55 business users.

MicroStrategy's technical support is fair.

We used SAS prior to MicroStrategy and I preferred SAS.

The initial setup of MicroStrategy is complex. Our organization's structure requires the handling of three environments of the platform, development and production with the corporate technology, production support and the other IT support making it very complicated to get the developed final product live. Deployment took two weeks. 

There is a ROI from MicroStrategy. The data management and visualization to start the business strategies creates new services. However, you do require an adjustment to policies in order to make a profit.

I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year.

I recommend other organizations focus on the data processing and data preparation for the platform because it is very challenging. 

I would rate MicroStrategy a 7 out of 10.