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 to receive all the reports from their customers who are logging into their website, such as customers purchasing products online.

The most valuable features of MicroStrategy are user-friendliness and integration with the different data warehouse systems.

MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support.

I have used MicroStrategy for approximately six months.

The stability of MicroStrategy is good.

MicroStrategy could improve its scalability. When comparing the scalability options to other solutions they are not very good. The licensing is one of the reasons it is not as scalable as it could be.

One of my clients has approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

The responsiveness of their support can improve. There needs to be more support for system integrators.

I rate the support from MicroStrategy a three out of five.

Neutral

The initial setup of MicroStrategy is straightforward.

I rate the ease of setup of MicroStrategy a four out of five.

The price of MicroStrategy is reasonable.

I rate MicroStrategy a six out of ten.

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.

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. 

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 different clients. Its deployment depends on the clients. For the most recent project that I worked on, it is deployed on-premises.

The dashboard features and functionalities that come through the MicroStrategy Suite are the most valuable. 

It can be used by end users with minimum knowledge of the product. They can run a report or create a dashboard on their phones, which is kind of cool.

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 have been using this solution for close to eight years.

It is stable to a certain extent, but after some time, it kicks the user out of the activity that the user was doing in MicroStrategy.

Their technical support is excellent. Technical support has been tremendous, especially for MicroStrategy. 

The user base for MicroStrategy is huge, and you have multiple platforms to post your question. I get a reply by the end of the day.

Being an admin, it was an easy task for me. If you are not an admin and you are just a user or an architect, the initial setup is not that easy as compared to other tools.

They can improve its licensing. It is a bit expensive as compared to Microsoft and other tools.

I would rate MicroStrategy an eight out of ten.

The technical support is quite good.

We have a global scale business, where we're doing reporting on a global scale. We also have local businesses, where the countries have to report in their own local data warehouse and so on. They can all use MicroStrategy, however, I would say that MicroStrategy is a very good fit for global reporting. Their reports are excellent and thorough.

For global reporting, it's something that we're going to keep to report to senior management on a global level across all the 50 countries. 

The user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills.

What I think it could be very useful to have is quick measures, where it automatically brings you, let's say, three default calculations. It will be very useful and it will be very, very important maybe for the future for Power BI to have more additional quick measures there. Instead of the user having to think about, "okay, how am I going to calculate this measure? How I'm going to meet this measure?" If you already have a list of all the measures there in the quick measures, it'll make the life of the end-user much easier.

The solution is lacking some of the interactions that Tableau or Power BI offers. They have visualization points. They have good process cubes and a semantic layer on that point. However, I think they are missing the parts of user-friendliness. 

There needs to be better integration with other platforms. You can connect to several sources, but then you cannot integrate it into the suite that maybe Microsoft offers or other products offer. That said, everything depends on where your company wants to drive the business in the future. 

The end-user interaction is lacking. It's not as intuitive as Power BI is, or, in certain cases, Tableau is on virtualizations.

It's not interactive. There's a lot of filters on the page. 

The solution's reports are not very flexible.

Using this solution means that a company will need to find people with special skills. It's very difficult. When you're trying to find someone with a skill maybe in Tableau, Power BI, or Sapio, it's much easier because there are a lot of people like that in the market. Even if you're looking for a data scientist, it's very difficult to find a suitable candidate due to the fact that they have to have skills in MicroStrategy. If you don't have a resource that really understands the tool, then it will lose the purpose.

The solution should be re-designed so there is less coding and more drag and drop functionality.

The organization has been using the solution for a long time. I've been in this company for a year. However, even before my time, they' were still using MicroStrategy. They may have used the solution for eight years or more.

On the point of the semantic layer, yes, they are very strong on the question of stability. However, you need to have people that specialize in SQL, that really are specialized in MicroStrategy, that they really understand how the tool works. 

The company bought 40,000 licenses. Globally they are using the product. On the sales report, everything is being done in MicroStrategy. We are trying to change the approach because we also to centralize the data somehow. Due to that, we're actually trying to minimize the usage, not to increase it.

We will reduce the volume of licenses in the future.

That said, we're a sizeable company, and in order to grow, you really just need more licenses, therefore, in that sense, it can scale well.

From my understanding, from my colleagues who use MicroStrategy, the technical support is fine. We've been satisfied with their level of service.

The companies that I worked previously were using Power BI and Tableau and Sapio as business intelligence tools. Currently, I'm largely focused on MicroStrategy.

I'm not aware of how the process went in the organization. I only began working in the organization one year ago, and this solution was already embedded in the company.

What I'm trying to do is to switch some of the things from MicroStrategy to Power BI in the organization, due to the fact that MicroStrategy may fit for some points, but it's not intuitive for your typical end-user customer.

I'm trying to evaluate what MicroStrategy can do and possibly what Power BI can do. I think Microsoft has a strong point, maybe, on the semantic layer side, whereas Power BI has a strong visualization and transformation part. The question now is if the two tools can coexist. Let's say if you can connect Power BI directly to the semantic layer of MicroStrategy and drive the reporting capabilities from there. That would be an option for the business and something we're looking into.

In Power BI, you have, for example, a performance analyzer. It means that the user can switch the visuals. MicroStrategy doesn't have that and neither does Tableau. It's something really only specific to Power BI. Let's say that you have a bar chart. You, as an end-user, can change it to a tonal chart. You can format the end report as you like and save it as a bookmark, so everything you open the report you see it as your view. 

We have a business relationship with the solution.

At the moment, the company is using the 2019 version of the solution. We may plan to move to the 2020 version, however, I don't know when this will happen.

The company I work for uses MicroStrategy and Power BI quite a bit, although I have used other BI tools in the past.

Of course, the company is considering a move more towards Power BI. I was hired by the company to introduce Power BI to the organization. But at the same time, there are some strong values in them continuing to use MicroStrategy. So the question is now, to try to understand where the two tools can coexist. From my perspective, in an organization, the solution always has at least two business intelligence tools. They should not only have one. It depends on the business needs in the future.

The only compellation between Power BI and MicroStrategy is that on the MicroStrategy part has a strong semantic layer on it. The disadvantage is that the user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills. Where in Power BI, it's very inclusive, I'd say, for the end-user. He doesn't have to have SQL knowledge, he can just maybe have an understanding of Excel and so on, and he can create several connectivities to different sources and build the thing.

While mostly this solution is on-premises, if we move to Power BI, it will be on the cloud.

The ideal situation for us would be if you could combine the Power Query from Power BI, the integration visuals from Power BI, and the personalization of the visuals from Power BI into MicroStrategy, then maybe that can work for MicroStrategy. 

They have a good data module. There's still a lot of SQL there. I think they should start to think maybe to adjust to zero-code or no coding. They should introduce drag and drop functionality, and maybe more quick measures compilations instead of doing a lot of things in the backend SQL. They should do something on a design front. It really needs to be more intuitive for the end-user, and drag and drop would help with that. 

I'd rate the solution overall five out of ten, simply because you do need to be quite specialized din order to use it effectively.

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.