MicroStrategy Reviews

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 iPad.

MicroStrategy is using what they call a meta-database, where you store all your business logic and you can re-use it in any report or dashboard. This helped us a lot. You now have one version of the truth and it is re-usable. You don't need to build complex calculations in your Excel sheet, as we were doing in the past, with the risk that someone made a slight variation to the business rules.

The dashboard and reports are what they call pixel-perfect, which means you configure a fixed size for your report and align everything based on the fixed size. But now you have various devices with different screen sizes, and it would be smarter to have a flexible layout which will scale according your device.

We have been using MicroStrategy for five years, starting with version 9.

MicroStrategy is running very stable but demands solid hardware.

So far, we did not have issues with scalability, but we never had more than 50 users using it at the same time.

Support is for technical issues, e.g., my installation does not work or I have a bug. It doesn't help you if you want to define new business rules and you would like to know what is the best way of doing this. Support will forward you to their consultants for these kind of questions.

We had Excel and a tool called Excelcius, which was just a tool to create a better looking dashboard. But your intelligence was still in Excel. We wanted to remove the intelligence out of the Excel sheets and into a central database.

MicroStrategy has a steep learning curve and you need to spend time in training before you can use the full potential.

The license is based on a fee per user, but recently they did decrease prices.

We were looking at SAP BO and Cognos.

MicroStrategy is what they call an enterprise solution, which means you can use it for reports, dashboards, self-service BI and mobile devices. The meta-database is a real advantage because of the reusability of your business rules, but you need to put time and effort into training; otherwise, you will get very frustrated.

MicroStrategy is an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence solution. There are various components of the software which are independent modules, but which work in conjunction to give a holistic enterprise-wide solution.

The most significant product feature is its robust data warehousing capabilities and metadata management. MicroStrategy lets the user create a different data model on top of the actual physical data model, according to the project requirements. This is a very helpful feature for modelling data and managing the metadata from different data sources in a single place. Any changes in the project data model or inclusion of new data fields is fairly easily accomplished.

Another key feature is that MicroStrategy is mobile-ready. This is one of the few software applications in the BI field which is mobile-ready. It is easy to build visualizations for mobile phones and iPads, and deploy them to end users.

The server architecture is very robust and enables the user to blast company-wide emails with BI reports.

The product has enabled the organization to blend data from different business units of the organization and product reports on it.

It has also replaced the manual process of sending out reports in an Excel sheet every Monday to specified users.

The product needs some improvement in its visualization capabilities. A fair amount of training is required to use this product.

The product is not business-user friendly. It has a lot of IT components which require special expertise. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities can be improved.

I have been using MicroStrategy for three years.

The product is stable. However, performance issues could be encountered if the server architecture is not set up appropriately based on usage and requirements.

Product scalability is easy and MicroStrategy provides additional support if required.

This software requires some training and technical expertise. MicroStrategy provides training sessions for users. They also provide technical support while installing the software and setting up the architecture, which is helpful. Technical support is very responsive and helpful. For larger organizations, they usually have a technical support specialist assigned who would answer any question via email or phone.

I have used many BI solutions other than MicroStrategy.

The initial setup is complex. However, MicroStrategy sends technical support to assist with the initial setup. These consultants work in conjunction with the company's employees to get it set up.

The pricing and licensing is a bit different than most products due to the suite of standalone tools that exist within the entire product. A sales representative would be able to assist with the pricing.

I reviewed IBM Cognos along with MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy was a better fit for our company needs due to its robust architecture, mobile-ready dashboards and a good pipeline of features coming in the future.

I keep learning new technologies and products to stay relevant in the ever evolving BI market. MicroStrategy has a good place in the market right now and is used by many enterprises as their primary BI tool. It also has better in some capabilities (handling large databases, server architecture, mobile-ready) than other tools in the market and has a good pipeline of upcoming advancements.

This is an enterprise-wide solution for which the return on investment is long term rather than short term. Evaluate the product appropriately with others based on your needs.

Intelligent Cubes: not all database environments are optimized for reporting, nor do all BI lanes have access to a proper data warehouse. Often the BI tools are directly used against operational tables from the source. Intelligent Cubes provide the ability to pre-cache the results for non-real-time reporting to give the illusion of real-time response from reports (especially dashboards).

It provides a single point of reporting from many data sources.

List of improvements that this product lacks:

• The ability to export and make the Intelligent Cubes shareable with other reporting tools.
• Expand on the capabilities of the Visual Insight dashboard creation wizard to include more complex document templates to make it more appealing for business users who need greater sophistication but less development time nor reliance to BI developers.

I have used it for 1.5 years at my current company, and for 15.5 years in my entire career.

In the long history of this product, version 7.2.3 is the most stable. Next to that, it is 9.4.1.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Unfortunately, over the past five years, fewer capable first-level technical support technicians have been able to answer my questions. The quality of technical support expertise has degraded and there is more reliance on the MicroStrategy community users to help each other than from the vendor.

Setup is overall fairly easy. However, changes in the metadata/statistics tables from one version to the next can benefit from better documentation to give clients a heads up.

Like any enterprise implementation, clients should first take time to analyze the needs of their organization, the level of expertise of their user base and how reports are to be delivered to the end users. Before doing any future upgrades, they should do a sizing exercise by gauging how much server resource is used historically and the projected use over the next 12 months. In particular, many companies underestimate the size and total number of Intelligent Cubes that need to be preprocessed each day.

What I’ve mentioned elsewhere: Planning and sizing is a must, as well as thoroughly understanding the user base and their reporting delivery needs.

• Rapid development: Once you have data, it is pretty fast to develop dashboards that are available in both web and mobile environments. It is quite easy to develop in days.
• Enterprise readiness

• Management's ability to slice and dice data quickly with ease

Any product/feature request takes years to get, if at all. This really pulls the rating down overall.

For example, the MSTR prompt interface sucks, where users can enter details to get data. However, they do not seem to be too worried about modifying it. Selector preferences cannot be stored per user. Prompts can be saved per user but that interface sucks.

Also, multiple currencies are handled poorly even after introducing two or more datasets in a document.

I have used it for more than two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues. We have four servers with DR capability.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We got MSTR Services to set it up.

With V10, they made life easier for licensing; bargain and do not take the quote as serious.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated MicroStrategy, Cognos 8/9, Tableau’s very early versions and QlikView.

It is good enterprise-level software. Consider Tableau and Qlik before making your decision. Evaluate your user readiness. For example, to use Tableau, the users should be more on the power users side. MicroStrategy is better if management is not tech savvy.

We primarily use the solution with enterprise-level financial companies, as well as retail and telecom organizations. 

There are lots of features that provide very robust functionalities.

The solution is ideal for enterprise-level companies or corporations. 

The stability is very good.

The solution has very good reporting tools. The reporting on the solution is excellent.

The solution offers some very powerful AI features.

We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better.

We've been dealing with the solution for 25 years. It's been more than two decades. It's been a very long time.

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't seem to crash or freeze. Its performance is good overall. It's a reliable product.

The scalability capabilities depend on the customer's environment. It depends on the infrastructure.

There are both premium and standard options. MicroStrategy works on the customer's infrastructure. This is a very different approach than, for example, Power BI.

There could be better scaling tools put into place. 

We have more than 2,000 users on the solution currently. There are potentially a lot of users. In Turkey, all of the financial companies or retail companies, and other sizeable companies in the country use MicroStrategy.

Technically, we don't need Microstrategy support. We typically handle troubleshooting ourselves.

That said, on the production side, we're happy to coordinate with support, however, we've rarely faced any issues that would require assistance. 

We also sell Microsoft BI. Commonly, enterprise-level or corporate-level companies use the MicroStrategy, however, SMB companies prefer Power BI.

MicroStrategy's installation takes time. However, it doesn't take weeks, for example. It only really takes a couple of days. In contrast, however, with Power BI there is no installation process at all. You just buy a license. After that, your Power BI is open.

I'm not sure of the actual cost of the solution. Licensing is not handled by my department. I can't speak to if it is reasonably priced or more on the expensive side. 

We are the company that handles approximately 95% of MicroStrategy implementation in Turkey. We are a distributor and a reseller.

I highly recommend MicroStrategy for enterprise-level companies. It brings some discipline to the industries for customers. Power BI, of course, is an option, however, part of it is like Excel or like a very free low-cost tool. 

A MicroStrategy implementer must synchronize with the customer and the application. You need to play with the features a bit and customize them to your needs. You cannot just list reports. You have to take some time to put some structure into the solution so that it works how you need it to.  

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are some excellent features on offer, which is why I rated it so highly.

We are using MicroStrategy in development and also for the web.

For our customers, Dossier is the latest for innovation and we like it a lot.

It's user-friendly, also the MTDI cube is a very good approach, as it helps you to use the pre-format instead of using the standard objects from the schema of MicroStrategy. It allows you to do more than the standard object.

We use a lot of data sources, and MicroStrategy allows us to use external data sources. This is very helpful. For example, we can connect to BigQuery, Oracle, and several other platforms.

The Dossier feature needs improvement. 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.

Some of the features that are in the developer should be moved into the web application.

There are some filtering capabilities on dynamic dates that are not easy to use in the Dossier.

There are features such as transformations that are harder to achieve than in the Data Studio. This is an area that needs some improvements.

I would like to have Hyper Intelligence that is free to use without a special license.

For mobiles, it should be easier to achieve without having to have a special license. Not everyone can afford to have a license for mobile and a separate license for the developer and the web.

Also, I would like to see something more in data mining and predictive analysis. In order to be able to build them, you need to have special skills. It would be easier to achieve, with some plugins, or some tutorials in place to help.

I have been working with this solution for thirteen years.

The tool is stable and scalable. We are testing each upgrade and even if some issues appear, hey are not show stoppers and our existing solutions are not afected.

We have an in-house team for deployment.

We have a license with packages, and there are additional costs for extra components.

I am a user and don't have all of the information regarding licenses and how they are acquired. I know this is a special contractual relationship between our managers and the team in the USA.

I am certified in MicroStrategy 9 and 10 for data analysis and as a report developer.

We are trying to connect MicroStrategy and Data Studio to the Google Cloud Platform. We prefer MicroStrategy and are trying to convince clients to switch.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The most valuable features are:

• A single integrated architecture: develop once, deploy anywhere.
• MicroStrategy Mobile: best in class mobile integration
• MicroStrategy Office: no need to connect to MicroStrategy web/mobile; open Microsoft Office documents, worksheets and refresh data as and when required
• MicroStrategy BigData Gateway: seamless connectivity to major Hadoop distributions
• Pixel perfect dynamic dashboards: high quality dashboards for board-level and management reporting
• Intelligent Cubes: load data once a day, no need to connect to the database.

We tried one of the leading reporting/BI tools in the market, but was it was not scaleable for enterprise levels. MicroStrategy does scale for enterprise levels.

There are a couple of areas that could be improved. Formatting the dashboard takes lot of time, which increases IT costs.

1. Dashboard development is time consuming, if you are doing corporate themes with a similar look and feel across all your visualizations. Starting Version 10.2, MicroStrategy provided features to re-use themes and templates across multiple dashboards. This does helps a little when you have grid/graph types of dashboards. However, when every visualization is different, it takes time to achieve pixel perfect visualizations. Having a Visualization Expert in the initial design stage helps with annotations and scales used within different panels, borders, etc., but it does take time to develop.
2. Tableau visualizations provide targeting from different data points to very different visualizations. There are some visualizations in Tableau which are much better than MicroStrategy.

We would also like to see more visualizations within Visual Insight. The existing visualizations are not at par with Tableau. I believe they were supposed to match Tableau capabilities, but they fall short on that. However, Visual Insight is better for end users who want to develop their own analysis and visualizations.

I’ve been using this product for 13 years; from version 7.5.2.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate technical support a six out of 10 (one-worst 10-best). Based on the level of support (Gold) we had, I have found tech support a bit sluggish. We had already resolved issues with workarounds before technical support came up with solutions.

We were using Tableau, but it had scalability issues and per-user licensing costs.

We did have some issues, but good documentation from MicroStrategy and the Technotes helped resolve most of them.

Pricing/licensing is little bit on the high side. Businesses buying this product should plan in advance what licenses to purchase. I would advise you to hire a contractor or free lancer with previous MicroStrategy experience to plan your project correctly.

If you have a user base that is going to increase over time, this product is best suited. Web-user licenses are unlimited for users who do not wish to create their own reports or dashboards and just want to view, download, and use.