MicroStrategy Reviews

It can be used for various things. We are currently using it for executive dashboarding, critical success factors, and business monitoring. We have its latest version.

It is easy to use and visually very appealing. One thing that sets it apart is that it has got a great ETL tool. As compared to some of the other solutions, it is much easier to process data from other applications in MicroStrategy. That's why we prefer using it.

Its price should be lower. In terms of features, what we have is quite encompassing right now.

I have been using this solution for about four or five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. Currently, we have five users of this solution in our organization. There are about two or three people who are responsible not only for maintenance but also for the enhancement of the reports and other things.

Their technical support is very nice.

We have used other products.

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.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. We plan to keep using it.

I would rate MicroStrategy an eight out of ten.

When we were using it before, it was mainly for some types of reporting, primarily sales reporting. We also use it for external reporting and that went out to our customers to allow our member hospitals to view their own purchasing data, for example, who they're buying from, what vendors, what kind of pricing they're getting. Mostly its reports on things of that nature. It was and is used for both internal reporting and external member facing reporting.

We moved to Tableau and we're still using it a little bit for some of our solutions.

The security is quite robust. It is more of a true enterprise solution. That made it much easier to deploy out at the time to our members. 

The common metadata, the library that MicroStrategy has made, makes it much easier to reuse components and not have to recreate them for every dashboard. That was something we really liked and still do.

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

Overall, we found the solution to be quite stable.

At the time we moved away from relying on it, the solution was really lagging as far as visualizations and ease of dashboard creation. It took much more of a MicroStrategy expert to design dashboards. It wasn't really something users could do on their own. The self-service component was really lacking.

The cost is pretty high. It was a little pricier than Tableau, for example.

The learning curve is quite steep. A company should consider a third-party service to help with implementation.

We've been using the solution for 20 years or so. It's been a very long time. We have a lot of experience with it.

Overall, we were really happy with it. As far as an enterprise solution goes, it was very stable. It was very mature and had many robust features, as far as building applications and alerting, et cetera. The thresholding just had a very robust feature set, which is what we liked about it.

We didn't really deal with bugs and glitches. It didn't crash and freeze. It was very reliable for many years.

The solution is well suited to enterprise-level companies. 

We are currently using Tableau. It's less expensive.

The initial setup was done a very long time ago. We had a third-party help us when we first implemented it back in the 90's. 

Since then, we have managed it ourselves. 

We did hire a third-party to assist us in the implementation process when we first set the solution up.

We are just a customer and end-user.

We are using the 2019 version of the solution.

I used to run a consulting company and we would consult on this solution. I would always recommend to our customers that they get a third-party to help them implement it initially due to the fact that the learning curve to implement MicroStrategy is much steeper than something like a Tableau.

Since we moved away from MicroStrategy, they've really gained traction on their visualizations and it's much more similar to a Tableau design now, as far as building visualizations. That was the only thing really lacking for us. It's good that they've moved in this direction.

Technically, we are still using the solution, just at a reduced scale.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use MicroStrategy for our supply chain and merchandising, because we are retail.

Performance has been pretty good so far.

Because we are in retail, we do a lot of analytics. The way that we designed the graph is pretty cool for our analysis on a daily basis, so that we can define our forecast.

Definitely the dashboards and the VI, because they're pretty cool for our customers.

Our business users have access to self-service.

And looking at 2018, the feature we plan on using the most is Dossiers.

Right now, MicroStrategy is on AWS by itself. Since we are retail - and AWS is Amazon, which is our competitor - if they would move onto different cloud environments, that would be awesome.

Stability is pretty good. We have been using it for four years. We might have had some downtime, but it's pretty easy to bring it up.

It really scales. The stability and scalability are really cool. That's the beauty of MicroStrategy. It competes really well with Tableau, but data-wise, MicroStrategy beats all odds.

We have used tech support many times. Sometimes they're knowledgeable. I would say that there is a lot room for them to improve. The time that I spend with the technical support, if I'd spent the same amount of time doing my own research on the knowledge base side, I could get pretty much the same thing. 

Some of the technical support guys are really awesome, but others...

It was pretty straightforward.

We prefer having the analytics capability in a single platform, versus in a many-points solution, because our user base is pretty small. I don't know if we even offer multiple platforms. I'm not sure if we have tried that or not.

We have already invested in MicroStrategy's mobile platform and it's pretty good.

When looking at vendors to work with, we look not so much at name brand but at technical support and application features.

I would give it an eight out of 10. There's a lot of room for improvement, with all the other BI tools in the market.

Go for it. If you are a retail company, I would say go for it, do a PoC, it should be fine. Because I've been working with MicroStrategy for the last 12 years, I know what it is capable of.

We have installed MicroStrategy and implemented a couple sample reports just to prove we can. However, we do not have all our current reports from Tableau replicated in a MicroStrategy environment, and we are headed that direction. 

We are planning on rolling out Self-Service and investing in mobile analytics.

In the immediate future as in the next month, because our other license expires in March, we want to hurry up and just get all of our reporting replaced and have them all in MicroStrategy, then we will move forward from there. 

We are still on the beginning stages, however having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner. 

It was easy to install and implement a report with it.

It is too early to tell. We have some ideas regarding what we can do, because we have been using a different product all along. We will see as time passes as to what we could do before that we have trouble with MicroStrategy, but I do not think it will be a problem. 

No issues.

No issues.

During installation I had some trouble, I created actually a couple tickets with the support department and Micro Strategy helped us straighten those out. They were very knowledgeable.

We are currently using Tableau. We recently signed a contract with MicroStrategy. We are going to move all our reports from Tableau to MicroStrategy. We are not going to connect Tableau to MicroStrategy, which we could. We are just going to let our Tableau license expire in March, then we are just going to go MicroStrategy all the way. 

We do not want to pay Tableau and pay MicroStrategy. It is a business decision. We are going to do one, not both. 

Initial setup was straightforward.

They gave us a good deal. They convinced one of our executives that we are getting a deal, so they signed. 

We want to do what makes sense for our business. We are not married to one way of doing it. We will listen to our business people and we will do whatever makes sense depending on the situation. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We want a solution that we can implement in a short amount of time. We don't want to go back and forth in a month; we want it to work right now. Also, we want to be able to have a vendor who we can reach, and they respond when we submit a ticket. They need to respond in a short amount of time. Even though, they are busy answering requests from other people our requests are important to us.

We are using it for operations analysis and sales data analysis.

We are still getting it setup, so it is hard to say how it is going to perform. We are not really live yet. We are in the setup and test phase.

We do plan on rolling out the Self-Service to our business teams.

The dashboarding is probably the best feature for us. It is something that we have not had in the past.

We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers.

In 2018, we will probably be using the documents and dashboards.

MicroStrategy seems to be very easy to use; user-friendly. Getting our data to work with it is where we are having issues.

We have not really scaled much.

I have not used technical support yet.

I was more on the data side getting it ready, not the administration of the product. The complexity is with our data, not really MicroStrategy.

Probably Tableau and some others, but I was not really involved in the decision process.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They need to fit what we are trying to accomplish.

• Mobile
• Data marts
• Cubes
• Visual Insights (VI)
• SQL engine
• MicroStrategy Office

Perfect balance between self-service and governed BI.

While VI gives self-serve agility, report wizard brings governance specifying limits on MicroStrategy and database end.

Development tools (developer and architect) need improvement.

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

More than 10 years.

While deployment is easier, the upgrade is painful process.

Developer, iServer, Webserver all are very stable.

Some versions have memory leakage or cube index issues, but overall very stable software.

No, scalability is strength of MicroStrategy.

Very average customer service.

Sales is very responsive, but technical support is below average.

Below average.

Used Tableau, Cognos, SSIS, BO, and Pentaho.

Moved to MicroStrategy for a scalable and mobile solution.

Straightforward.

In-house.

Hard to calculate but offering a single BI platform brings down maintenance and time to market time.

While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos.

Yes, Looker BI.

The real difficulty is finding a correct development resource for MicroStrategy as it has a steep learning curve and is unlike other tools on the market.

The OLAP environment is valuable. The user can find all the data in a single place and through the web, without needing to install anything on their machines and, of course, once you have created the necessary metadata. That is not as easy in other platforms, such as Microsoft.

It gives people access to data in a single place (portal).

I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

I have used it for three years.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had some scalability issues, but they have not been a big problem.

Technical support is poor. You have to read their manuals and that's pretty much everything you have.

The company I was working for chose that course of action. I'd rather we did a proof of concept with several vendors instead of choosing MicroStrategy up front.

The initial setup was complex, really complex! Lots of configurations and installations.

It's expensive. I believe there are others that can provide most of the features for a better price.

No other options were evaluated. My boss at the time didn't want to spend time with evaluations, unfortunately.

Compare, and if you're going to spend a lot of money anyhow, there are better options, surely!

The aesthetic capabilities of the dashboarding functionality are probably the most impressive. It enables designing really great looking widgets that I have not seen in other offerings.

A single management dashboard is visible on the big screens of all the company chiefs. This enables them to easily refer to it during meetings. They are able to drill down on specifics. It provides a view of the current position of the companies KPIs, and provides the main source of ‘true data’.

Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for seven years.

I did not have any issues with stability.

I did not have any issues with scalability.

In South Africa, the level of support is very limited to Johannesburg. Very few local partners exist that support the application, compared to other tools in the market. I would, therefore, rate the level of technical support specifically in South Africa as mediocre.

Previously, the company used SAP Business Objects. I made the decision to switch over to MicroStrategy because Business Objects was acquired by SAP at the time. Most ongoing development on BusinessObjects became SAP-focused. This didn’t help us because we are an Oracle-centered organization. MicroStrategy seemed to be the best fit due to its being major database agnostic.

The setup was straightforward and relatively simple.

It’s very expensive. If the pretty picture isn’t one of your core requirements, then most other tools would fit the job.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos and QlikView.

It is essential to have resources available in the organization for harnessing the true potential of the tool.