MicroStrategy vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics comparison

MicroStrategy and Salesforce are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. MicroStrategy is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.5, while Salesforce is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.6. MicroStrategy holds a 3.5% mindshare in BIT, compared to Salesforce’s 1.4% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of MicroStrategy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Salesforce users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between MicroStrategy and Salesforce Einstein 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. Salesforce Einstein Analytics Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy vs. Salesforce Einstein Analytics

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MicroStrategy is 3.5%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is 1.4%, down from 1.8% 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.

Read full review

Pietro Saglietti

Management Consultant at STG

A robust solution for powerful data analytics

I need some reliable references or resources because it's proven quite challenging to obtain information about MicroStrategy in Italy. It's frustrating not to have access to pricing details because, when discussing analytics tools in general and specifically mentioning MicroStrategy to potential customers, I can't provide them with essential information about pricing, licensing, cloud options, on-premises solutions, and more. Overall, it is a good product and I would rate it nine out of ten.

Read full review

Parker Goodson

Enterprise Account Executive at T-Mobile

Helpful consistent measurements, high availability, and scales well

When it comes to generating reports, it appears that many users rely on experts to handle technical aspects. For instance, if you require a weekly report displaying accounts transitioning in and out of your modules, it seems challenging to accomplish without consulting experts for assistance. Such tasks should be user-friendly and easily achievable without external assistance. It would be beneficial to have visibility into any changes made to your account by individuals other than yourself or your team. It is also important to clearly track the history of these modifications and identify the responsible parties.

Read full review

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 most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."

"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'."

"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."

"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."

"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."

"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."

"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."

More IBM Cognos pros

"It is one tool which you can find everything. "

"Transaction Services, that was really the part of the tool that made it very compelling for us, because it gave the opportunity to drive action."

"The solution has excellent features available on mobile."

"The most important feature is the way it handles ad hoc queries and provides formatted reports."

"I like the user interface and the experience has been great."

"It is definitely customizable. We have been able to put in key metrics and performance indicators, thus it is customizable."

"I haven't come across any bugs."

"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."

More MicroStrategy pros

"It's scalable."

"Einstein Analytics provides insights into what we are doing and how we are doing it. It tells us what benchmarks we need to hit consistently to achieve our goals. In sales, there is sometimes a disconnect between actions and objectives. We aren't necessarily going to close a deal because we call X number of people. There are some underlying skills that add nuance to these metrics."

"The way Salesforce Einstein Analytics is structured in terms of the work assignments and the user profile is very good."

"The most valuable features of Salesforce Einstein Analytics are the flexibility around the deployment, overall capabilities, user-friendliness, and interactiveness with the tools that came built with it."

"It is a comprehensive solution. It has everything in it. I can easily find what I need."

"Transparency is the most valuable feature of this solution."

"The tool is valuable. It's one of the greatest programs I'm currently working with, and I believe it will continue to be crucial in the next four to five years. It's the future of our operations. Integrating other systems and conducting campaigns is easy. The solution relies heavily on AI."

"The inbuilt features, like pictorial representation of the data and the ability to remap and realign the data, provide clarity in understanding sales perspectives."

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics pros

Cons

"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."

"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."

"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."

"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."

"They should provide improved visual reporting."

"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."

"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."

"This product could use improvement in terms of usability for those with less technical know how."

More IBM Cognos cons

"The online community page of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking."

"There is room for improvement on the graphs."

"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."

"It is performing well, but sometimes we have complex requirements and the performance decreases, and then we have to find another way to make it perform again. That is what you encounter when use the project, but that's inevitable because if we would have used another product, we would've had the same thing."

"They should give proper industry-based tutorials so that one can learn it easily and implement it based on the requirements. They should give more MMP files so that we can import a whole project altogether and learn from that project."

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

"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."

More MicroStrategy cons

"The product is natively integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem. You also need a CRM license. It should be more flexible with other platforms."

"They have a lot of opportunity to improve BI tools. With Einstein Analytics, we have a very minimal scope."

"When it comes to generating reports, it appears that many users rely on experts to handle technical aspects. For instance, if you require a weekly report displaying accounts transitioning in and out of your modules, it seems challenging to accomplish without consulting experts for assistance. Such tasks should be user-friendly and easily achievable without external assistance."

"All of the timesheets and appraisal management I have not been happy with. There should be some improvements. For example, as a management team, our managers do not have access to see a summary report, such as who is on leave today or how many hours each person logged in. You have to get into individual users and see. You cannot see a summary report, the reporting is missing. There should improve the reports."

"The price of Salesforce Einstein Analytics is quite a bit expensive for the region of Mexico. I think the price of the product could be better."

"Better pricing would make it available to more users and we would likely use it more broadly within the organization."

"If a user leaves your organization, you shouldn't lose the visibility of all of the records."

"The product is expensive."

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"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."

"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."

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."

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

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It would be nice if there was a sticker price that says, "This software costs this amount of money." But I think that's just indicative of all software vendors. A lot of people are in it to make money, commissions, so it's just the nature of the business. But I would like to see more transparency, more equality, on pricing. Some people get better deals than others, I think."

"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."

"They gave us a good deal."

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

"We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly."

"Now, the price is high."

More MicroStrategy pricing and cost advice

"Salesforce has a subscription-based licensing structure, where it's between $20 to $75 per month, per user."

"Salesforce Einstein Analytics can be considered somewhat expensive, depending on the company's needs. If they want the complete package with all the features, it's pricier. It all comes down to what the company requires from the platform."

"Although it was deemed slightly expensive and failed the cost analysis we conducted in our company, we proceeded with the purchase because we desired to have a leading CRM system in the industry."

"I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."

"The solution is expensive."

"Price-wise, Salesforce Einstein Analytics is an expensive tool."

"The biggest challenge we had was the cost and the licensing. We ended up getting an enterprise licensing agreement(ELA). That took a lot of negotiations and a lot of pressure. We were able to receive a good price for the community licensing they bundled Salesforce Einstein Analytics. They bundled a lot of capabilities with us with the ELA."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

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 ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

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

See all answers

What do you like most about MicroStrategy?

The stability of the product is good.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?

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

See all answers

What do you like most about Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

The tool is valuable. It's one of the greatest programs I'm currently working with, and I believe it will continue to...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

Salesforce is working very rigorously on improvements with each release.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Salesforce Einstein Analytics?

I am a Salesforce CPQ developer. I have also worked on Einstein Analytics for reporting purposes.

See all answers

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 20% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs MicroStrategy

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs MicroStrategy

Compared 5% of the time

More MicroStrategy Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 44% of the time

Databricks vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 14% of the time

IBM Watson Explorer vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 11% of the time

Tableau vs Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Compared 9% of the time

More Salesforce Einstein Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy

November 2024

Download MicroStrategy product report

Buyer's Guide

Salesforce Einstein Analytics

October 2024

Download Salesforce Einstein Analytics product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

Einstein Analytics, Salesforce Wave Analytics

Learn More

IBM

MicroStrategy

Salesforce

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.

Salesforce Einstein Analytics is a customer and business analytics platform that’s optimized for mobile use and brings flexible customer analytics to everyone in the company. It works with many types of data, from many data sources, and it can change the way your company answers critical questions. Einstein Analytics allows you to:

Connect directly to your CRM data and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
Automatically analyze millions of rows of data and get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
Explore data quickly and automate actions with prebuilt apps.
Use mobile to act, whether you're on Android or iOS.

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.

ADS Securities, Alstom Grid, American Express, Barclays Bank, Coca-Cola, CoderDojo, Dubai Multi Commodities Centre, Financial Conduct Authority

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy vs. Salesforce Einstein Analytics

October 2024

Free Report: MicroStrategy vs. Salesforce Einstein Analytics

Find out what your peers are saying about MicroStrategy vs. Salesforce Einstein Analytics and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

816,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our MicroStrategy vs. Salesforce Einstein Analytics report.

See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.

We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.