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Looker Studio vs MicroStrategy comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (7th), Reporting (4th)
Looker Studio
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (13th)
MicroStrategy
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (9th), Embedded BI (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Reporting
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

it_user453288 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 2, 2016
We have over 400+ reports going out every day based on different conditions.
Powerful Report Studio and Event Studio: We have stringent requirements for the reports that go to investors. Report Studio helps us to deliver pixel-perfect reports in both HTML and PDF formats. Event studio is such a powerful tool: We have over 400+ reports going out every day based on different…
JP
Aug 14, 2019
Easy to use and offers a plethora of query sources
We primarily use this solution for business reporting This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves. The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and the plethora of query sources. There is a significant degree…
it_user221904 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 23, 2016
Once you save a dashboard, it is available on all devices, including your iPad.
In version 10, Visual Insight had a major improvement. Now, it is a very powerful self-service BI. In version 9, you still needed Flash on your machine, but version 10 is based on HTML5. It is very easy to build your dashboard and once you save it, it is available on all devices, including your…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"Cognos is the best application with dashboards,batch reporting, jobs, events and ad-hoc reporting for business users."
"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."
"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."
"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."
"The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. We observed the progress of our portfolio from last week to the current week, allowing us to compare revenues."
"The ability to integrate with a great variety of data sources."
"The ability to design complex data models and equations."
"Valuable features include advanced integrated analysis and easy implementation."
"I am impressed with the tool's scheduling mechanism, refresh mechanism, and different types of charts."
"The best thing about the tool is that it allows you to share information easily and dashboards with colleagues and teammates because it's all online. No matter where you are, as long as you have the Internet, you can connect and use these dashboards. Google made good documentation for this tool. There are many examples of how to use and create dashboards and videos on YouTube. So, I think it's easy to learn."
"Data Studio integrates seamlessly with other Google products, and we can use it with other APIs if we like."
"This has improved our organization by allowing people to see their data and develop visualizations themselves."
"Dependency on development teams, as well as managing the platform, has reduced a lot with Visual Insight.​"
"The technical support is quite good."
"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."
"It has the potential to become a great evangelist for AI and other embedded analytics."
"The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave."
"It is a good tool to help our customers visually see loads of data."
"It offers us a lot of out-of-the-box tools, which give us the ability to automate a lot of our administrative tasks. Some things become menial: user creation, restarting a server at 10 o'clock on a Friday - simple things that they really give you the tools to be able to do. That's one thing I really like about the MicroStrategy platform from an administrative perspective."
"The ability to create aesthetically pleasing information by providing dashboards."
 

Cons

"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The solution's support could be better."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"I would like to have predictive and forecasting capabilities in Cognos. It's one thing to do reporting, and another thing to easily predict or forecast certain data points, which is very important for all the clients."
"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."
"There is a significant degree of sophistication required to compete with Tableau or Cognos."
"Other tools might be worth considering if you need more advanced features or support for a larger user base."
"Insisting on forums, blogs and community outreach in communications, and posting videos on an established calendar would be useful."
"It's not yet a replacement for a complete BI tool."
"Panels are not as easy to use as other data extraction UIs."
"Stability and scalability an be improved for a full ten."
"The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicating KPIs or quick calculations. It lacks a good calculation-based language like Power BI's DAX, making it less suitable for professional use. Additionally, the variety of visualization tools is limited, and customization options are restricted."
"The challenges with Google Data Studio are associated with the security part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The web developer tool for documents creation does not have all the features of the client version"
"We have seen some stability issues with MicroStrategy on cloud. We have a few unhappy customers."
"I would like to see a feature where migrations are easier. When you migrate from certain environments, it could probably be a little cleaner. Sometimes it seems to be somewhat clunky when you migrate from one environment, say a development to a test or production environment."
"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."
"We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better."
"Something I would be interested in is more visualizations, because right now we use SDK to create some. If there were more out-of-the-box options, we would be happy with that."
"If they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help."
"Another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is affordable."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."
"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."
"Pricing should be improved."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"The product is available for free."
"The solution is free but the Google Looker is expensive."
"The cost is quite affordable based on feature analysis."
"The tool is free."
"I think the tool is cheap because you don't need to pay anything for using the tool. However, when connecting and analyzing other data sources, you should consider where to analyze this information because Google Data Studio doesn't handle much data well. You must also consider how you will connect this data to it. In this case, you might need to hire DevOps or a data team to help with these issues."
"The price of MicroStrategy is reasonable."
"​They gave us a good deal.​"
"There is no subscription, I am using the free version."
"It is expensive. We would like to extend it to many users, but we are currently restricting that because the cost is a constraint. If we are given a chance, we would love to expand it."
"The solution’s licensing cost is expensive."
"I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year."
"Now, the price is high."
"The pricing list itself is not publicly accessible, so it's a bit opaque."
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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
59%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing 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?
The tool does not have much documentation on the internet. It is not easy to resolve issues by finding the reason for...
What do you like most about Google Data Studio?
The company dashboard is useful because we could share it via a link as a reminder for everyone to check it weekly. W...
What needs improvement with Google Data Studio?
The tool has a lot of room for improvement. It's not very professional and allows for only simple tasks like indicati...
What is your primary use case for Google Data Studio?
The solution is a visualization tool that helps to make dashboards.
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 room for improvement in data visualization. Compared to other BI tools like Power BI, MicroStrategy is stron...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Data Studio
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.
Genesys, Shueisha
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 Looker Studio vs. MicroStrategy and other solutions. Updated: February 2023.
800,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.