MicroStrategy Reviews

I'm working in a company, so we need to do the visualization for our client. Therefore, we are using MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy's best feature is that it is a user-friendly tool.

There needs to be better visualization. It could be good to add new visualizations. Some of the visualizations are not there in MicroStrategy.

I have been using MicroStrategy for a year. I am a developer and user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

In my company, our team consists of around 100 people. Though there are not so many members in my company, my team consists of around 100 members. Out of all my team members, around 70 people are using it.

I have contacted the technical support team of MicroStrategy. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was easy.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

From a data visualization perspective, I use the tool's ability in relation to chats and Esri maps, which is my most valuable feature. There are a lot more functionalities available in the product. Predominantly, I have experience in the area of ODBC when it comes to MicroStrategy.

For everything we do in our company, we consider MicroStrategy to be a workaround solution. For better customization in documents or dashboards, MicroStrategy can improve the features or settings available to make the development easier. I see that dossiers have been introduced in the solution to help the users do self-service in dashboards. I think the tool is not very straightforward for the developers to use the documents, so there is a lot of pending development work in the product. The aforementioned features can be improved in the product.

The online community page of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using MicroStrategy for ten years. My company has a partnership with MicroStrategy.

The stability of the product is good.

The product can be scaled out to a certain extent, but it only depends on the requirements of the users.

I have contacted the solution's technical support. My company has a separate team to reach out to the product's support team. My team does not directly contact the tool's technical team. The product's support team has the ability to provide solutions to issues. I was satisfied with the responses provided by the product's support team.

I rate the product's support team a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have some limited exposure when it comes to Power BI.

For users to be able to use MicroStrategy, they need to have a clear understanding of the application part of the product. When it comes to Power BI, it is easier for users to create dashboards with the tool's self-service capabilities, but it won't be an easy process when it comes to MicroStrategy because they might need to rely on developers to help with the schema part, that user can develop a dashboard with the help of the schema that has been set up. With Power BI, it is easy to pull the data and directly consume it while using the dashboards without the help of any developers. The self-service part is more convenient in Power BI. In MicroStrategy, only if the scheme is built properly can the end users consume the data from the schema. Then, users have to be completely dependent on the developers in MicroStrategy. Power BI is very easy to configure, and you just can do fancy customizations, but in MicroStrategy, one requires skills to do the same, considering that it has a few limitations. The calculations of even complex or huge data can be easily dealt with when it comes to MicroStrategy. If a user has to deal with simple data sources with limited size, then Power BI is good, but MicroStrategy is better at dealing with large amounts of data.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product. For beginners, there are trial accounts that are provided by the product.

The product has improved areas like data analysis and reporting since I have used the product in domains like education and banking, where I found it to be useful for providing insightful data to our company's customers, especially those who are accessing multiple sources of data. With the tool, I was able to connect to different sources, consolidate, and provide a dashboard where the customers can analyze the data and make insightful business strategies. The tool has been really helpful for me to collate data from multiple sources.

Based on the domains my company works for with the tool, we provided different data visualization formats like charts or heat maps that allow users to understand data more easily than the normal legacy grades or tables. Through visualization tools, my company's customers were able to do analysis in a better and faster way compared to what they could have done using the legacy tools to share data.

The tool possesses abilities in the area of advanced analytics, but I haven't used it. Microstrategy HyperIntelligence cards are available, which can be used in the area of advanced analytics.

The performance issues in the product can be handled. Every tool has some performance issues, and it all depends on how users design it and how they consume the data, along with the maintained infrastructure. If everything is done properly, the performance issues related to the product can be resolved.

My company has access to the dashboard provided by the solution that we can configure and use on mobile phones.

The current project I am dealing with in my company does not require dashboards provided by the solution. Previously, I had used the dashboards provided by the solution in mobile phones. The dashboards are compatible with mobile phones and on websites. It is a bit tricky to have the layout of the dashboards configured on the website and the mobile phones, but it is manageable and possible.

I rate the overall tool a six to six and a half 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. 

I am a developer working with MicroStrategy, specifically focusing on tasks related to making cubes and viewpoints. Although I am not involved in solution architecture, I utilize MicroStrategy as an end user, working within its provided framework.

MicroStrategy saves time and money for repetitive tasks, streamlining certain processes within our organization.

The most valuable feature of MicroStrategy is the ability to make your own cubes and, from those, create viewpoints. This is particularly useful in data analytics where cube making goes hand in hand.

There is a need to improve the automatic generation of metrics in MicroStrategy, as currently everything must be done manually. 

Additionally, the hierarchy creation process in MicroStrategy could be improved.

I have been personally working with MicroStrategy for approximately 12 years.

I would rate the stability of MicroStrategy eight out of ten. The product is generally stable.

I rate the scalability of MicroStrategy as seven out of ten. We have faced some challenges, such as a lack of optimization in the data model, which affects its ability to scale efficiently.

The customer service and support for MicroStrategy are satisfactory. We have a certain agreement with them and have consultants available who respond promptly.

Positive

I didn't evaluate other solutions prior to using MicroStrategy.

I am not working directly with the BI architecture aspect of MicroStrategy, so the setup process comes to me already finished. Therefore, I cannot comment on whether it is simple or complex.

Based on my experience, I can recommend MicroStrategy for enterprise-level companies. It efficiently handles around five thousand users.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I just maintain the platform and develop the reports.

MicroStrategy does have just standard reporting on them. Not more than that. A few mobile reports.

Learning curve: 

From the end-user perspective, it depends on how the report is designed. It's very easy to handle, like a regular website. 

For end-users developing self-service, the handling itself is easy as well, but the end-user has to have some knowledge of data, I mean data wrangling and stuff like that. Otherwise, you wouldn't know what to do. It's the same, like in Excel, for example. 

For developers, if someone already has some knowledge of data warehousing, it's not a big problem. It's just another content that you can learn.

I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging.

We have MicroStrategy in place for a couple of years, actually more than 15.  

It's quite stable, actually. We don't have a lot of issues with the platform. So it's good.

The data volume is not a problem because we have data warehouses. We only point to data warehouses where we have the data stored. 

So it's actually the distinct count of current users that would be necessary to scale up. But we don't have to cope with that right now.

We did have some issues over the years. One or two issues a year. We changed servers to the Unix platform. We had some troubles there. It was actually hard to find someone who has Unix experience with MicroStrategy. Because most of the staff had good knowledge with Windows, but not with Unix. So this was actually quite challenging. Once we had all the issues closed, it was stable then. But it took at least a few weeks.

We have different products like Oracle. We are trying to harmonize and switch to only one technology.

We are not developing something. We are just defining the target architecture. And after that, we will create a project for the transformation.

We already have a lot of experience, so for us it's not a hassle.

I was part of the in-house deployment. 

Not for all the deployments, but for the reports that we develop, we deploy them.

I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging. 

If you have data, it is not that complex. It's manageable even for end users. But most of the time, some source systems have a lot of tables. And so if you have to make some matrices, you need to know what to do and how to do it. So you need a little bit of experience. It really depends on which source systems you're reporting from and which users you have.

In our case, with our purpose and the skills we have, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

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. We use MicroStrategy as an architect to call some tasks and procedures to update data or delete data. 

I am the user to check data in dashboards.

It's a good tool.

There is room for improvement in customer support. 

Another area of improvement is stability of this solution. 

I've been using MicroStrategy for one year.  

I would rate the stability an eight out of ten. Sometimes Power BI is better than MicroStrategy.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. We have a small team, so we have around two end users using this solution. We use the solution regularly. 

We had some problems. We have technical support for my clients because it's a big company. So, our technical service connected to the technical service of MicroStrategy, and they decided how to fix some problems. For example, we needed to add the time sort MicroStrategy to update the end date of the full time, top dates view from a specific time.

We evaluated Oracle BI and Power BI.

We saw a return on investment.

It is not an expensive solution. We need to pay for a license.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We used the solution for reporting and data visualization. We used Google BigQuery to collect data and build dashboards and reports about production, manufacturing data, HR, people, positions, and headcounts. MicroStrategy was the platform where we built visualizations on dashboards, created standard reports in table format, and allowed some users to analyze the data.

The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful.

The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. 

There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation.

I have been using MicroStrategy for two years actively. Our company is using the latest version of this solution.

The solution is stable. We haven’t got into any trouble.
 

The solution is scalable. We have used the solution with 100s of users, and it has been good. We never saw any logging or problems.

We connected and wrote a question to them, which was answered in a few days. We checked the problem together and finally figured out it was something misunderstood.

I previously used SAP BusinessObjects BI, and it was not as fast as MicroStrategy with the same data set size. The solution moved smoothly and quickly based on the in-built engine and some queries. SAP BusinessObjects BI can be used if you have an SAP environment because they have the connectors. However, SAP BusinessObjects BI is not up to date today. SAP is using Elastic Cloud. Both tools are very similar, but SAP BusinessObjects BI has some limitations and graphical queries. It's not as beautiful as Tableau or Power BI, but it is good. In some cases, SAP BusinessObjects BI is slower than MicroStrategy, but it has more features and tools. MicroStrategy is better for SAP environments.

It is important to have a good user security strategy. When building a model, take some time to consider how you want to secure it; limited or accessible. The goal is to build a Symantec career, but it may be in the early stages. It's a good effort. However, step by step, over time, it will pay off. It is a good investment.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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.