MicroStrategy vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

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Microsoft Power BI

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Microsoft Power BI and MicroStrategy are both leaders in the business intelligence domain. When comparing features, Power BI stands out for its user-friendly integration with Microsoft Office, while MicroStrategy tops with its robustness in enterprise-level analytics.

Features: Power BI offers seamless integration with Microsoft Office, makes connecting to a variety of data sources simple, and provides dynamic interactive dashboards. MicroStrategy excels in detailed data visualizations, offers strong enterprise-level capabilities, and has robust mobile features.

Room for Improvement: Power BI can improve in handling larger datasets, expanding data source support, and enhancing its mobile application. MicroStrategy is often seen as complex with high costs, needing more user-friendly tools and enhanced visualization capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Power BI is easily deployed, especially for Microsoft users, and is available in both cloud and on-premises options. Microsoft's customer service has strong online resources but is occasionally inconsistent. MicroStrategy, typically deployed on-premises, offers extensive customization but requires more frequent and complex support.

Pricing and ROI: Power BI is competitively priced and integrates well with Office 365. Its free desktop version covers basic needs but has a gap between Pro and Premium licenses. MicroStrategy has higher initial costs, justified for large enterprises due to its robust features, and offers licensing flexibility with negotiation.

To learn more, read our detailed MicroStrategy vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: January 2025).

MicroStrategy vs. Microsoft Power BI

January 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Power BI

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

1st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

318

Ranking in other categories

Reporting (1st)

MicroStrategy

Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

159

Ranking in other categories

Embedded BI (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 22.6%, up from 22.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MicroStrategy is 3.5%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

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Harjinder-Singh

Data engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Offers a simplified attribute and maze-creation process but lacks a thriving community

The solution provider should take some initiatives to grow the MicroStrategy community because, presently, it's quite small, and I wasn't able to find a solution to my problem by searching in the community. MicroStrategy can offer user-friendly training through platforms such as YouTube. Recently, at our company, the features we were able to utilize in the developer tool were not there in the workstation; such issues can be resolved through training videos or learning content distribution from MicroStrategy. The solution provider is presently promoting the workstation on the cloud instead of the developer tool, so there should be relevant resources for learning about the product. MicroStrategy is also working on integrating AI technology into its product. The object migration process from one environment to another using the solution is somewhat complex. It involves package creation, dependency, and transportation. But the migration process is rather simpler in OBIEE, where reports need to be archived in one system and unarchived in another, for example, from Dev to SID.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best feature of this solution is the way you can plan, communicate, and visualize all the knowledge you extract from the data for the customers. I like the way you can show or visualize the information a client needs to answer a business question."

"The stability is good."

"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."

"Its connectivity with other Office applications, mostly with Excel, and the ability to deploy it very easily are the most valuable features. It comes sort of bundled with the cloud, so you don't need to set up a server and a standalone infrastructure. So, getting into the system or building something that you can deploy is very easy and very cheap. With other systems, you need to have a server, and you need to have a license for the server. The initial setup is very costly."

"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."

"It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured."

"The solution is stable."

"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are its intuitiveness and ease to use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"The data governance leads people to trust the data that they have, and they know where to get it."

"Scalability is the best thing. You can really scale."

"It definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it."

"Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us."

"We leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting."

"The most valuable features are drill down, dashboards, documents, bringing everything under one roof, and visualizations."

"Now we can collaborate, in real time. In the past we had to wait for our business partners say if a visualization looked good or sufficed for their requirements. There was no real-time decision making. Now, with Dossier, it will accelerate the velocity of decision making."

"Scalability is fantastic. It can go from a small operation up to a gigantic operation. "

More MicroStrategy pros

Cons

"The integration in Microsoft BI could improve for other solutions, such as Oracle DB and PostgresSQL. Additionally, the reporting from the databases to Microsoft BI should be in real-time and the overall performance could be better."

"The visualization aspect, while being the most visible to business users, also happens the be the weakest point in the entire Microsoft BI stack."

"This solution needs integration with SAS and more deep analysis functionality."

"Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way."

"The solution could improve the extraction and transformation of data. For example, you transform the data and then send it to Microsoft BI without having to use your own API. We are only providing the API to Power BI, and then Power BI is doing the job."

"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."

"I'm not overly technical, and so I can't really speak to any shortcomings from a technical standpoint."

"Its price could be better. Its licensing cost is very high."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"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 they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help."

"Consolidate the functional offering to be more concise in the front-end for web reports, dashboards, and self-service."

"They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services."

"In the developer, there are things that you able to do in a document or a report that you are not able to do in the Dossier."

"The solution's reports are not very flexible."

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

"It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts."

More MicroStrategy cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"All of the licenses are on an annual basis, but Microsoft will amortize it to an extent. If it's five years, they'll include the possible interest they might have the following year. Ideally, their licensing scheme is an annual license, but they make it easier for some of our clients to take a five-year license but package everything inside for them to buy the license for five years."

"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."

"We have a professional license for Microsoft BI and the price is fair."

"If you purchase a license for a server, for users, or the professional version, you might not have to. The free version I think it can satisfy many customers' needs."

"It is reasonably priced."

"Power BI is cheaper for smaller groups when comparing to competitors. It requires a monthly per-user subscription."

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"For larger businesses, the pricing is logical."

"They need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects. We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them."

"We actually researched some of the other solutions. For options, price, and customer acceptance, this product has worked well for us."

"The pricing for MicroStrategy is always on the higher side. They should seriously start thinking about their pricing and licensing strategy."

"The solution’s licensing cost is expensive."

"We have one of the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information."

"They offer yearly as well as perpetual licenses."

"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."

More MicroStrategy pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

42%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

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 manually. Additionally, the hierarchy creation process in MicroStrategy could b...

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Comparisons

Compared 16% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 9% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

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Tableau vs MicroStrategy

Compared 24% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Cognos vs MicroStrategy

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs MicroStrategy

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs MicroStrategy

Compared 6% of the time

More MicroStrategy Competitors

Product Reports

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Microsoft Power BI

December 2024

Download MicroStrategy product report

December 2024

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

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Microsoft

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Overview

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Product portfoilio:

MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.

Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.

Sample Customers

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

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.