MicroStrategy vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

MicroStrategy and Hitachi Vantara are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. MicroStrategy is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.6, while Hitachi Vantara is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.0. MicroStrategy holds a 3.4% mindshare in BIT, compared to Hitachi Vantara’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of MicroStrategy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between MicroStrategy and Pentaho Business Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed MicroStrategy vs. Pentaho Business Analytics Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

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 MicroStrategy is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.6%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

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.

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Azhagupandi Parthiban

Vice President Of Technology at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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Sayan König

Senior Manager, Financial Services at KPMG

Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up

The repository should be improved. There should be the possibility to have versioning, to make it combinable with some Git repositories or something like that, to check out the processes and make sure it has a traceable history. The solution could really be improved. There are too many bugs in our version.

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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

"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."

"The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau."

"The three IBM Cognos features I find the most valuable are Dynamic Cubes, PowerPlay, and Watson."

"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."

"It's enabled us to report directly from our main application systems. We're removing islands of data and we're removing inefficiencies, where people or small divisions had their own store of information."

"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."

"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."

"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."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The simplicity of MicroStrategy is what I like the most."

"The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good."

"The technical support is quite good."

"I like that they're trying to incorporate Developer into Workstation and Desktop into Workstation, so you get the all-in-one encompassing, highly technical Developer Workstation where you can do the VI, you can do the Dossier."

"It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now."

"The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution."

"It is scalable and integration-friendly."

"MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic."

More MicroStrategy pros

"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."

"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."

"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."

"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."

"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."

"Easy to use components to create the job."

Cons

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."

"Need improvement towards Visualization."

"It would be good if the solution had conditional formatting."

"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."

"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."

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."

"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."

"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."

More IBM Cognos cons

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

"If you compare it with Power BI with the DAX language, it would be great to put that into MicroStrategy."

"I want to be able to have one report that's delivered to 30 different people and all 30 different people see something different. Now, you can do that today with metrics. You cannot do that with attributes. There's a component of that which, if an attribute is on granularity-one and another is on granularity-two, and you remove granularity-one, you're now going to be summing to a level that you did not expect before."

"I would like to see more integration."

"MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting."

"I think they're still lacking on customer service. I think historically, MicroStrategy's customer service was a lot better than it is today."

"With Cube partition (v10.1 and above) scalability has not been an issue, but the Cube publish time, and temporary space consumption while the Cube is being published, has almost doubled during implementation of Cube partition."

"You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document."

More MicroStrategy cons

"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."

"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."

"Logging capability is needed."

"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."

"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."

"Version control would be a good addition."

"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."

"The repository should be improved."

More Pentaho Business Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."

"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."

"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."

"It is averagely priced."

"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."

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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."

"The solution’s licensing cost is expensive."

"They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free."

"MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product."

"The pricing is fair."

"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."

"They gave us a good deal."

"There is no subscription, I am using the free version."

More MicroStrategy pricing and cost advice

"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."

"Free and commercial versions are available."

"Pentaho is expensive ."

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Comparison Review

it_user6978

Co-Founder at Helical IT Solution (Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Talend, Kettle, DWBI, ETL, Ctools, iReport, Jasper Report)

Jun 10, 2013

Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition

Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

Educational Organization

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 ...

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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.

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What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

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What do you like most about MicroStrategy?

The stability of the product is good.

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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.

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What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?

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

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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 wou...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?

The organization has both options based on their needs and budget constraints. The Enterprise Edition is expensive wi...

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What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?

The product to me is not as user-friendly as other players in the market. It also still needs improvement in the repo...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 13% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs IBM Cognos

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Tableau vs MicroStrategy

Compared 23% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs MicroStrategy

Compared 18% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy

Compared 7% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs MicroStrategy

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs MicroStrategy

Compared 5% of the time

More MicroStrategy Competitors

KNIME vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 27% of the time

Databricks vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 16% of the time

SAP Crystal Reports vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

Tableau vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

More Pentaho Business Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

December 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy

December 2024

Download MicroStrategy product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Business Analytics

December 2024

Download Pentaho Business Analytics product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics

Learn More

IBM

MicroStrategy

Hitachi Vantara

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

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.

Pentaho is an open source business intelligence company that provides a wide range of tools to help their customers better manage their businesses. These tools include data integration software, mining tools, dashboard applications, online analytical processing options, and more.

Pentaho has two product categories: There is the standard enterprise version. This is the product that comes directly from Pentaho itself with all of the benefits, features, and programs that come along with a paid application such us analysis services, dashboard design, and interactive reporting.

The alternative is an open source version, which the public is permitted to add to and tweak the product. This solution has its advantages, aside from the fact that it is free, in that there are many more people working on the project to improve its quality and breadth of functionality.

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.

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.

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

December 2024

Free Report: MicroStrategy vs. Pentaho Business Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about MicroStrategy vs. Pentaho Business Analytics and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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