What is our primary use case?
Create and share reports and dossiers, included mobile application
How has it helped my organization?
It is first full BI solution in our company, desighnted and administrated by BI department wo internal companyes
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
3 years totaly and 1 year on version 2020
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had any bugs with the latest version of MicroStrategy.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.