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Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
Amazon QuickSight
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
3rd
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
MicroStrategy
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.1%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MicroStrategy is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado - PeerSpot reviewer
Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department
I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.
Anoop Jose - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature
Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking. Especially for root cause analysis, the ability to drill down from a high-level problem to its root is crucial. Aside from that, QuickSight is a good service.
Azhagupandi Parthiban - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for security and performance but lack of user-friendliness
MicroStrategy, for me, it's the visualization and user-friendliness that needs improvement. When compared to Power BI and Tableau, that's their sweet spot. They're super easy to pick up and use. Plus, they've got this cool association feature that updates when you change the timeframe. But with MicroStrategy, there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in integrating with developed mobile solutions using MicroStrategy. We struggled to deploy to iOS, and the Android adaptation was a big challenge for us. Everything that worked in iOS wouldn't work in Android, and videos and calendars were a whole other mess. So, user-friendliness for non-technical users and mobile performance on Android, particularly in India, where it's the dominant platform, those are my two big areas for improvement.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"Cognos' most valuable features are the bundled studios, simple UI, and advanced features like the ability to create data modules."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."
"The initial setup is quite straightforward."
"If they want dashboarding, storytelling, and analyzing why KPIs are met or not, then Cognos is a better candidate than Qlik Sense."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility to visualize certain logs."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the user interface."
"Amazon QuickSight can provide insights from the available data. It supports various rule types. We get the options of machine learning and insights, which are not available in other intelligence tools. It is easier to use, more stable, and cheaper than other solutions."
"It is notably fast in handling large data set refreshes, making it efficient for data analysis."
"The solution is simple to implement."
"It is fine for basic reporting."
"Amazon QuickSight has introduced a new functionality called Q bar, which allows the user to do natural language queries and get additional insights using some built-in generative capabilities."
"It works well with the AWS ecosystem."
"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."
"The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy."
"Provides seamless integration between browser-based BI and Mobile BI."
"The architecture is very solid."
"Technical support has sent us to rapid response before, when we really needed them."
"On our mobile solution you can deploy up to 100,000 users. In our case, we're up to about 10,000 active users, and MicroStrategy's server technology behind the scenes, the Intelligence Server and the Mobile Servers, are very robust and they can handle the workload."
"I think what we're currently excited about is the ability to integrate R. Most of our data scientists use R for their modeling. I heard at one of the sessions, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, that you can put your R scripts directly into MicroStrategy, so any modeling effort that you've done in the past can be transferred into MicroStrategy."
"It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps."
 

Cons

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I think the GIS pieces maybe not as good as we would like."
"They were lacking in the initial phases of development in the area of big data, and they still need to improve that aspect of the product."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"IBM Cognos's error messages seem to be a bit ambiguous. An error will be encountered and a message will be sent out very ambiguous and after investigating the error message it could be any number of issues. There was never a direct answer to the question or a direct answer to the error messages. Sometimes it would be a generic error message for 21 different solutions. It wasn't very specific, which required a lot of digging around and trial and error trying to fix the problem. The messaging in their error messaging is something needing improvement."
"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."
"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."
"Amazon QuickSight's visualization could be improved."
"The product has some storage and SPICE data issues."
"It can be made more user-friendly as some users might find this solution hard to implement. Qlik Sense, for example, is very user-friendly."
"It's not ideal for reports that are more complex."
"I just want a few more features to be added."
"It is a simple tool with limited features. Its visualization set is very limited, and it also has limited functionality. An intelligence tool should not be only for creating reports. Currently, we have to do all computational and mathematical operations outside. We should be able to do such operations in an intelligence tool like this. As an intelligence tool, it should support dynamic refresh. QuickSight currently supports the refresh at a minimum of one hour, and it is not suitable for dynamic dashboards that require frequent refreshes."
"There is room for improvement in terms of the number of visualizations and dashboards that are available."
"The product is quite expensive because the price is too close to QlikView's prices but it does not ring as well as QlikView."
"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."
"The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space."
"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."
"MicroStrategy's mobile dashboard is still not a RESTful design."
"Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem.​"
"I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing."
"The pricing could be lower because it is costly."
"If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training.​"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"Pricing should be improved."
"It is averagely priced."
"The solution is affordable."
"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."
"It is simpler and cheaper than other solutions."
"I rate the price of Amazon QuickSight a four on a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"It's affordable compared to other long-term contractor business tools available in the market."
"The product pricing is better than other vendors."
"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."
"The solution is not affordable."
"The solution's pricing is cheaper than the other products in the market."
"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."
"The licensing is a bit high per user."
"MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product."
"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."
"I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year."
"We have one of the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information."
"​They gave us a good deal.​"
"The price was good. We have had great support along the way."
"They offer yearly as well as perpetual licenses."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Retailer
8%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...
What do you like most about IBM Cognos?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...
What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?
The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?
QuickSight is considered cost-effective. As far as I know, QuickSight is cheaper compared to other solutions like Pow...
What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?
QuickSight needs to add more visuals similar to what Power BI offers. I have noticed that many drill-down visuals and...
What do you like most about MicroStrategy?
The stability of the product is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MicroStrategy?
For larger businesses, I think the pricing is logical, but for smaller companies, it can be a bit costly.
What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?
There is a need to improve the automatic generation of metrics in MicroStrategy, as currently everything must be done...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
QuickSight
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com
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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon QuickSight vs. MicroStrategy and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.