MicroStrategy Reviews

Project Schema/metadata- Very flexible, connects to a variety of different data sources and is very flexible for many specific tasks. Attributes/metrics/filters created once used by everyone.

Intelligent Cubes- Can improve almost any report to run in seconds. Used often for dashboards and documents containing millions of rows of data.

Visual Insight Self-Serve tool - Allows users to create their own dashboards. There are multiple reasons this is important. Users create their own dashboards which saves resources. Users have better insight of the dashboards they require and a better on new data required in their schema and/or intelligent cubes.

Data blending for end users- They can use other data that is not yet part of our managed/governed data. It is seamlessly included it into some of the dashboard/reports that they have created. This allows users to get the reports they require without having to wait for your data team to provide the data in the data warehouse or MicroStrategy schema. It also provides you with requirements for expanding your governed data.

Mobile solution with iPad/iPhone - We haven’t gone this route yet but we did do some POCs and it was very impressive.

Management would spend half a week gathering data and number crunching in Excel. It was a long, slow and tedious process. In the end they could not calculate at the level of detail required. Today, management can focus on analyzing the numbers and also exploring other avenues of improvement using the self-serve features.
One example is reviewing actual route performance versus the expected performance. The result is better identification of problem routes and measurement of changes.

- Many users have requested some specific graphing capability. More precisely, they would like the ability to configure a graph to be formatted and displayed identically to their excel documents. This is not always possible.

- The web developer tool for documents creation does not have all the features of the client version. When adding a derived attribute you can no longer edit the dashboard in the client version.

- There is no type of version control to check in or check out items. As a result, users create multiple backup folders and this produces multiple versions on the go.

-Different functions and options available with intelligent cubes created from MicroStrategy Web and MicroStrategy Desktop. Options such as scheduling and multi threading/partitioning.

- We would really benefit with more mapping functionality and compatibility with different types of mapping data types. One example is a Microsoft geography data type. Using the ESRI out of the box map plugin to draw lines between two co-ordinates and colour code them based on a metric value.

- Visual Insight /Self-serve - Simple ways for users to total/percent their data to a specific level. Translating a grid developed to a graph. In summary, make the self-serve area even more intuitive/easy to use.

-Exporting to PDF is a major pain point in the dashboarding/self-serve area. Alignment and colours are not maintained. This was allegedly fixed in version 10.6. We are starting the process to upgrade to 10.8 so I can not comment further.

-Users were not able to login with using LDAP. We had to add an environment variable to ignore LDAP referral chases. TN#15655 on MicroStrategy’s website.

-IIS Web Server would have a long initial load time. A variety of IIS settings were changed to increase performance. This is more of an IIS issue than probably a MicroStrategy issue, but I think it should still be noted since it’s above and beyond the basic installation setup instructions.

3 Years

Yes there were a few unique setup steps and configuration settings related to Windows Active directory and Web Server setup.

2 years in production and I don’t believe we’ve had a single issue in regards to the system being down or unavailable.

No requirement to scale larger. Scaling infrastructure hardware such as additional severs would not be an issue.

I’ve dealt with a lot of vendors such as SAP, ESRI etc. I would rate them better than those but overall just average. You can talk to a MicroStrategy engineer in person if you call their support number. I find I mainly use their online tool and they will usually answer the question within a day or two. Any type of enhancements or bugs you will have to wait for another release or two before seeing a fix. We are signed up with the lowest support package offered.

No previous solution, we do have business objects within our environment but it was not selected as the platform moving forward.

Initial setup is straightforward. Reading through the installation documentation is a must. Afterwards, you have a had a good idea of what is required before installation. You can run through a number of installation prompts and the software is installed. It gets a bit more technical setting up your environment after the standard setup. Manual steps after the installation such as setting up a clustered environment, integrating windows authentication with windows AD groups, intelligent cubes, cache and history etc.

Was not involved in purchasing.

We've converted our CPU licenses to user named licenses since we have two 32 core I-servers that are clustered. That means 90% of our power was sitting idle and wasted because of CPU licensing. There are a lot of benefits to have multiple CPUs. We've increased our cube refresh performance. Cube performance can be partition to use multiple CPUs. Best thing we did.

I was not involved in the decision making process.

We use it for reporting, it's enterprise-wide reporting. There are tons of different things, some scheduled by MicroStrategy. Those old-fashioned reports, PDFs, Excel, and even portfolio and task stuff. Works for many industries now, different business lines, finance, supply chain, etc.

MicroStrategy has become an obsolete product. It might still be around for another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, but I wouldn't recommend using it for any specific use cases. Unless you already have a MicroStrategy license, in which case it might be worth sticking with MicroStrategy for cost reasons. However, I wouldn't buy new MicroStrategy licenses.

There are definitely some drawbacks. The biggest one is the complete lack of a community around MicroStrategy compared to other BI tools. This can be a huge problem from an IT department head's perspective. If a developer gets stuck on some task, they might spend hours or even days trying to solve a problem because there's no helpful information online. 

With tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Looker, you can easily find solutions and ask questions in forums or ChatGPT (OpenAI). It's almost impossible with MicroStrategy.

Another drawback is the lack of a talent pool. It's very difficult to find developers with MicroStrategy expertise. There are barely any online courses or tutorials available, and even searching for information can be frustrating. You won't find educational videos at the top of the search results; instead, you'll see stuff about Bitcoin investments. This lack of focus on development is a major downside. 

I've been quite disappointed with MicroStrategy's investments in recent years, with them prioritizing discounts over research and development.

So, in terms of functionality, MicroStrategy is alright. It's a solid BI tool and can handle most tasks you'd expect. The problem lies outside the tool itself. You need a strong community to learn from and keep up with the rapid development of BI tools. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy lacks that community support. You're either stuck figuring things out yourself or paying expensive fees to MicroStrategy consultants for help. This isn't the case with tools like Power BI or Tableau, where you can find experts readily available. In addition to other drawbacks, it's not cost-effective either. 

The on-premise version used to be the only option, which meant buying licenses for CPU units. While cloud migration with SkyLink in MicroStrategy Cloud makes scaling easier, it still requires initial setup and configuration. This button with Azure or AWS can take a couple of weeks, depending on your data sources and desired outcomes. Compared to other solutions where you can start quickly and iterate, MicroStrategy's approach might be seen as slower and less agile.

I have been working with this solution for ten years. I worked with the cloud version of MicroStrategy.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten because MicroStrategy is generally stable, but every new version seems to have bugs.  

For scalability, I would rate the standard on-premises version, I'd rate a two out of ten. But the cloud version is a seven out of ten.

In Europe, I know of around 700 organizations. The US will have much more.

You can pay for customer service and get help with specific issues. They have different tiers of support, like first-line and so on. You submit a ticket and wait for a resolution. If it's simple, you might find some help. But for complex issues, they might just push it to the next product release.

So, overall, the support is pretty good. 

Positive

I currently use other tools like Business Objects, Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services, and others.

I didn't choose MicroStrategy. It was already in place at my previous company, and I inherited it. 

It does require deployment, and with Azure's architecture, you need a central computing unit like MicroStrategy Intelligent Server. So, that must be installed and configured. 

Once it is set up, you can start integrating data into it and building dashboards. Setting this up takes time, but it has the advantage.

The advantage of this approach is the enterprise scale of the solution. You have time to carefully consider your implementation and follow a more waterfall-style approach, eliminating and minimizing errors. 

This is unlike some other solutions where you can start quickly with Excel files and move data into BI tools rapidly. While that's convenient for speed, it can lead to neglecting a solid, scalable approach for the future.

The deployment took around a couple of weeks. It takes around two weeks to configure everything. Moreover, setting up the project and defining the data sources and desired outcomes can also impact the timeline.

The Azure part has a publicly available flat pricing structure. But for the on-premises version, you negotiate directly with MicroStrategy. They're often willing to offer significant discounts, up to 80% off the original price. The pricing list itself is not publicly accessible, so it's a bit opaque.

Overall, I would rate the solution a five out of ten. 

MicroStrategy is helpful for all aspects of the company's operations, including accounting, marketing, and human resources. It's an on-premises solution, but we are looking into migrating to Azure, but it won't be this year. We are looking forward to it in the future, but not at this time.

MicroStrategy has powerful data security features, which are crucial these days. For example, when users view data in MicroStrategy, they're only allowed to see a portion based on the permissions. When we evaluated other solutions like Power BI or Tableau, we found the security is very poor. They can't help us secure access to the data.

I would like to see more integration. 

We have been using MicroStrategy for 12 years. My company is French, so we use MicroStrategy for business intelligence because it's not an international solution. It's a French solution.

MicroStrategy is highly stable, and the security is okay. We have a few MicroStrategy servers, a dispatch log, and a load balancer, and we can add more on-premise solutions and servers to improve the performance. We are considering making a switch to an Azure solution eventually but not right now. We can tweak MicroStrategy's performance, and the load balancer works well.

MicroStrategy is scalable. We currently have 7,000 users, but we are changing the use case and plan to grow to 20,000 users over the next two years.

We have a regular call with MicroStrategy support once a week.

MicroStrategy is easy to set up.

MicroStrategy helped us with the migration. We didn't do that alone. The MicroStrategy team is 10 persons, including one leader and eight or nine engineers.

We pay annually for an annual subscription, and we renegotiate the price periodically. I don't know if it's cheaper than solutions like Tableau or Power BI. I don't remember comparing the cost. It's okay for us because we have a lot of users, and MicroStrategy gives us a reasonable price.

I rate MicroStrategy eight out of 10. We've tried other solutions and we're sticking to MicroStrategy. We started using MicroStrategy in 2010, and we've looked into switching to another solution twice, but both times our procurement department has found that MicroStrategy is better. It's a great tool.

From a data visualization perspective, I use the tool's ability in relation to chats and Esri maps, which is my most valuable feature. There are a lot more functionalities available in the product. Predominantly, I have experience in the area of ODBC when it comes to MicroStrategy.

For everything we do in our company, we consider MicroStrategy to be a workaround solution. For better customization in documents or dashboards, MicroStrategy can improve the features or settings available to make the development easier. I see that dossiers have been introduced in the solution to help the users do self-service in dashboards. I think the tool is not very straightforward for the developers to use the documents, so there is a lot of pending development work in the product. The aforementioned features can be improved in the product.

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

I have been using MicroStrategy for ten years. My company has a partnership with MicroStrategy.

The stability of the product is good.

The product can be scaled out to a certain extent, but it only depends on the requirements of the users.

I have contacted the solution's technical support. My company has a separate team to reach out to the product's support team. My team does not directly contact the tool's technical team. The product's support team has the ability to provide solutions to issues. I was satisfied with the responses provided by the product's support team.

I rate the product's support team a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have some limited exposure when it comes to Power BI.

For users to be able to use MicroStrategy, they need to have a clear understanding of the application part of the product. When it comes to Power BI, it is easier for users to create dashboards with the tool's self-service capabilities, but it won't be an easy process when it comes to MicroStrategy because they might need to rely on developers to help with the schema part, that user can develop a dashboard with the help of the schema that has been set up. With Power BI, it is easy to pull the data and directly consume it while using the dashboards without the help of any developers. The self-service part is more convenient in Power BI. In MicroStrategy, only if the scheme is built properly can the end users consume the data from the schema. Then, users have to be completely dependent on the developers in MicroStrategy. Power BI is very easy to configure, and you just can do fancy customizations, but in MicroStrategy, one requires skills to do the same, considering that it has a few limitations. The calculations of even complex or huge data can be easily dealt with when it comes to MicroStrategy. If a user has to deal with simple data sources with limited size, then Power BI is good, but MicroStrategy is better at dealing with large amounts of data.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product. For beginners, there are trial accounts that are provided by the product.

The product has improved areas like data analysis and reporting since I have used the product in domains like education and banking, where I found it to be useful for providing insightful data to our company's customers, especially those who are accessing multiple sources of data. With the tool, I was able to connect to different sources, consolidate, and provide a dashboard where the customers can analyze the data and make insightful business strategies. The tool has been really helpful for me to collate data from multiple sources.

Based on the domains my company works for with the tool, we provided different data visualization formats like charts or heat maps that allow users to understand data more easily than the normal legacy grades or tables. Through visualization tools, my company's customers were able to do analysis in a better and faster way compared to what they could have done using the legacy tools to share data.

The tool possesses abilities in the area of advanced analytics, but I haven't used it. Microstrategy HyperIntelligence cards are available, which can be used in the area of advanced analytics.

The performance issues in the product can be handled. Every tool has some performance issues, and it all depends on how users design it and how they consume the data, along with the maintained infrastructure. If everything is done properly, the performance issues related to the product can be resolved.

My company has access to the dashboard provided by the solution that we can configure and use on mobile phones.

The current project I am dealing with in my company does not require dashboards provided by the solution. Previously, I had used the dashboards provided by the solution in mobile phones. The dashboards are compatible with mobile phones and on websites. It is a bit tricky to have the layout of the dashboards configured on the website and the mobile phones, but it is manageable and possible.

I rate the overall tool a six to six and a half out of ten.

Primary use case would be for mobile apps, exposing mobile data to people who need data at the right time and the right location, and MicroStrategy does that. 

It does so extremely well. They have one of the best mobile BI apps available. They've the got the whole power of the MicroStrategy ecosystem, and they just expose it through the app. It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps. It's pretty cool.

In the old days - which is not long ago, about 10 years ago - before iPhones, you literally had to go back to your desk to run a report, and your report could take an hour to run. 

Now, you can run that same report, you can access it from Starbucks, or wherever, to your mobile device, and you've got access to information. The decision makers within your company have access to the information wherever they want it, whenever they want it.

Building apps is easy. You just drag in your data, and then you drag in all the elements that you want on your app. It's drag and drop design, and then you can customize your visuals. They make it all easy with plug and play widgets. That just makes it too easy. Don't tell my employers.

We use Writeback mainly for regular database transaction tables. It's just a feedback loop, back into the mobile dashboards. You can type into those and then writeback whatever you wrote in, back to a database. And then, when you refresh your dashboard, everybody can see your input refreshed, instantly. It's an instant feedback loop, we don't writeback to any source systems. It's just for MicroStrategy's circle of functionality, an "interloop."

Since I'm a "mobile-dashboardy" guy, I would like to see more capabilities on the mobile side to bring it on par with apps that you see in the App Store, like Uber or Facebook. They've got all the bells and whistles - well, maybe not Facebook. The interface you can design in MicroStrategy is great, but I feel it needs to be refreshed, add a bit more functionality. As a developer in 2018, at least I have features that we're seeing in other apps in the App Store. I feel like we're a few years behind with our features, but still pretty excellent features.

We haven't really had issues with stability. 

Well, in the old days, say a few years ago, upgrades only came out once every year and they were more stable. But MicroStrategy has moved to a quarterly release, so they've got a lot more new features in there, which means there's an opportunity for bugs to slip through. So, occasionally, the Mobile Server does crash, but it instantly recovers and users typically don't even notice it. 

If the disconnect happens when they're on a screen, at least their data is there, and because there are local device caches holding the data, there's a certain offline capability that is just built-in naturally, so you don't need a connection all the time. By the time the Mobile Server comes back, they didn't even notice. Typically, downtimes are very limited.

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, which is impressive.

I've learned by trial and error, but I've been working in it for about 10 years, so I've seen everything. We do use support occasionally in our company, for the bugs that we can't find a solution for.

They have different levels of support. The front-line support is okay resolving problems. I couldn't put a percentage on it, but once it escalates up to the next it usually gets resolved.

They've got a robust knowledge base that's open to the public, in the Community. You can literally search any problems there and somebody else has usually encountered it. You can fix a lot of problems yourself using the knowledge base, or talk to service. They usually fix the problems pretty fast.

Regarding upgrades, for version 10, which is the latest version, the upgrades are more robust. There aren't as many issues as in the previous version, version 9. There were definitely issues upgrading from 9 to 10 because it's a huge upgrade, but typically it's the same issues that you're going to encounter. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy is known for upgrade pain, so a lot of companies don't upgrade. You will encounter problems, and when you have major enterprises that can't run some reports for days or weeks on end, that's not acceptable. But that happens rarely. 

Version 10, I've noticed that in the upgrade process I have not encountered any problems, so there something has changed in the upgrade process for the better.

We are embedding multimedia content in our apps. Last week, I did a for-fun dashboard. It was all about Star Wars and Return of the Last Jedi. I had some active video in there that I started streaming from Vimeo. You can do that, you can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely.

We are also distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push ads, for IOS and Android. It's pretty easy on MicroStrategy. There is a bit of configuration involved, so you definitely need to have a technical administrator help you get it set up, and your Apple developer to get all the certificates. There are a lot of moving parts, but once you get it set up, the alerts are great. You have to manage them, because you don't want an alert, the same alert, coming to the same person every 10 seconds because they will get annoyed and they will stop using your app. So, there's a fine line between too much information and too little.

We have configured our mobile apps to work offline to a certain extent, but most of ours do not work offline because there are some limitations involved with the offline modes, the performance issues, and sometimes performance is more important. There are tradeoffs. In some cases, we need offline data sets, but most of our clients use WiFi in the stores where they can launch their mobile app, and they're always connected. So they don't need offline. It depends on the use case. In our case, it doesn't really apply.

What I appreciate most in a vendor would be transparency, that they're being upfront with me. I would like to be able to purchase a piece of software that I know is going to cost me a lot of money, but I want them to be giving me their best price and not trying to give me a higher price and then I have to haggle with them to get a lower price. 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.

From my perspective as a mobile-focused, dashboard kind of guy, looking at how the business intelligence solution looks, I would rate it, capability-wise, an eight out of 10. It is dragging behind other tools on the self-service visualizations, like Tableau. I would rate Tableau as a 10. For the same visualizations, I would say MicroStrategy is an eight, maybe nine. They're still behind on the self-service visualizations, but on mobile visualizations I would give them a nine or even a ten. It depends on what part of the tool you use. Some parts are older and haven't had any "love" in the past, and some areas, like Dossiers, are getting all the love right now and they look modern. From my point of view, I would rate them pretty high, overall.

Think about how many people and how much money it's going to cost to implement a solution. It's not just buying the software, which is pricey. You have to think about all the servers - you need multiple servers. You need a lot of people, you need an administrator, an architect, you need developers, mobile developers. I was talking to one guy, he has a team of 40 people, and this is just building reports. So that's a hidden cost there, if you want to crank out a lot of work, you're going to have to have a lot of people. It's not just for a small company. It's just too much.

I'm working in a company, so we need to do the visualization for our client. Therefore, we are using MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy's best feature is that it is a user-friendly tool.

There needs to be better visualization. It could be good to add new visualizations. Some of the visualizations are not there in MicroStrategy.

I have been using MicroStrategy for a year. I am a developer and user of the solution.

It is a stable solution.

In my company, our team consists of around 100 people. Though there are not so many members in my company, my team consists of around 100 members. Out of all my team members, around 70 people are using it.

I have contacted the technical support team of MicroStrategy. I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was easy.

I recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Create and share reports and dossiers, included mobile application

It is first full BI solution in our company, desighnted and administrated by BI department wo internal companyes 

I cannot say that MicroStrategy is a very good solution because it's not simple for the administrator. It is very simple for the users, though. In version 11, we had a lot of bugs and a lot of problems. But in 2020 we migrated to a new version, MicroStrategy 2020, and now we have no problem with this solution and it works very well.

In my opinion, Power BI and Microsoft servers are more powerful and cheaper than MicroStrategy. But only MicroStrategy has a solution for mobile phones. Actually, not only MicroStrategy, but MicroStrategy's solution for mobile is very good.

For example, all our top directors and board members only use the mobile version. Of course, we have some problems between iPhone and Android versions. It's not simple to build one report for two mobile decisions. Of course MicroStrategy works perfectly on an iPhone, but with Android we have some problems because there are different Android versions and mobile phones.

So now we don't want to migrate to something else, so we will stay with MicroStrategy, and our plan is to migrate to the cloud version or update to MSTR 2021 Enterprise solution.

In terms of what could be improved in MicroStrategy, it does not have enough variance of visualization for building dashboards, etc. and I need to buy a custom visualization from  different companies. It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts or if more visualization options will be added in future updates.

3 years totaly and 1 year on version 2020

We haven't had any bugs with the latest version of MicroStrategy.

We have limitations with MicroStrategy, but the limitations are from our servers because we have a lot of users, and a lot of reports, and of course we need the most ability from the system and from servers because we need to have a lot of memory and a lot of CPU. For example, every Monday at 9:00 in the morning, all our users, maybe 300 users, are running a lot of reports. It's not good for the system, but the system works. At the moment it is very hard for the servers, but MicroStrategy is a very stability system.

I don't have any down times. Of course, our decision to migrate to the cloud version is because I don't want to administrate the servers. It's not my problem. I want to administrate only MicroStrategy for users and reports.

I have not had any contact with tech support. We have our own team within our company for maintenance because we have one ticket to date that is open with the support team and we don't have answers for one week. I don't understand what's happening at times. But through this I can review the report or receive my problem. So of course I want to have an answer immediately.

Did you previously use a different solution and if so, why did you switch?

MicroStrategy is comparable to Power BI, Tableau or Qlik. There is no big difference.

But there is a difference in price, in cost. With MicroStrategy I need to buy licenses for the users only once. Whereas for Power BI, I need to pay every year or every month.

I really recommend the Power BI, but if I were to go to another company, and change my work, today I would want to continue working with MicroStrategy. I really recommend it.

At the moment, we have received some cases to log in with MicroStrategy for education. It is a big plus of MicroStrategy's that we have this possibility. MicroStrategy sites have a great  education part, with a lot of meetings, a lot of video, etc...

On a scale of one to ten, I would give MicroStrategy a 10.

• The ability to work directly on top of almost every known data source, while creating optimized queries for each data source type.
• The ability to take the load of the DB with cubes while still baeing able to access the raw data at the db level when needed.
• The ability to "complete" missing features in the big-data platform with mstr features.
• The ability to create very complex queries logic automatically.
• The flexibility to integrate various data sources without ETL.
• The freedom to generate reports and use both cubes and relational data in the same dashboards seamlessly.
• The ability to create simple but good looking dashboards easily while still being able to implement very complex logic and UI in more complex documents.

The ability to investigate high-level data in cubes and once an issue is found, you can directly drill to the row-level data within the same platform. No coding or integration is needed between different tools. It is all done within the same platform, using the same objects, which allows the best of both worlds, especially while working on large-scale projects (big data).

• The default color pallets could be improved, and they are improving with each version.
• Simplification of the various configurations: The product offers a huge amount of options and configurations. It takes a while to get a good grasp of it all.

I have used MicroStrategy very extensively for over five years.

We encountered a few stability issues in the early 10.0 and 10.1 versions. Since 10.3 was released about 6-8 months ago, it has been stable.

version 10.4 was the first "platform version" and is more stable , while creating complex dashboards in 10.3 you might encounter various UI bugs , for most there are simple workarounds though.

I have not encountered any scalability issues. The only thing is that if you plan on using cubes as a solution, prepare the servers with enough memory; processing the cubes is heavy on memory.

The platform now supports a cluster of eight nodes, which should be enough for over X *10K users.

the customer service is usually pretty high , support responses to cases within a day or 2 , even for cases which are not P1 priority.

Technical support is at a high level. Most of the time, they are quite accurate; most issues are solved within 2-3 iterations, even without remote login to the servers, which is not possible most of the time.

• I previously used Panorama on top of Microsoft SSAS cubes. I think that in today’s world, the cube is just a fragment of the performance tuning, rather than being the complete solution. Therefore, when people keep asking for the raw data, the cube simply does not contain it.
• In today’s big data projects, nobody thinks about taking all the data out to a cube, with very limited capability to drill back to the actual live data.
• Regarding SSAS cubes, today’s dashboards are complex, and only a small number of developers actually write MDX queries correctly. Therefore, each additional logic requires a very experienced developer and takes a lot of time.
• Panorama had stability issues.
• I also worked with Qlik, but I do not think it is meant for today’s big data projects. Nobody wants islands of data completely disconnected from the original data (no way to drill for further details, and no way the detailed level will be extracted from Hadoop/Vertica into an in-memory application).

The initial configurations of the server and the project require a high level of experience. The installation is rather straightforward, but the configurations require deep understanding of the product and the environment.

Most high-end tools cost roughly similar, but the TCO of MSTR is said to be lower than others due to the reuse of objects and the ability to work with the dependencies between the objects, instead of guessing which report/dashboard uses which metric.

Of course, we evaluated Qlik, Tableau and MSBI Suite.

If you are not a MicroStrategy expert, use one, especially in the initial phases of the projects; it will save you a great deal in the long term.