MicroStrategy Reviews

We use MicroStrategy to create dashboards and reports for our top management.

We are still not using it one hundred percent but we plan to be by next year.

Their basic tutorials could be improved; there are not enough. They should provide more tutorials and include some project files. 

They should create some project files. For example, if I see a project online, I can deploy that project and import it into my production. From there, I can learn how to create attributes from that project. 

I have been using MicroStrategy for one year.

I haven't come across any bugs, but as I mentioned, I am not using it one hundred percent at the moment.

We are paying a lot for MSTR support but we're not getting the proper support that we should be.

We actually got technical support from one of the vendors (which was not cheap for us), but still, we couldn't make enough dashboards, even with their help. I rely on google for a lot of help. I've been manually creating my existing reports in PHP and MariaDB to MSTR.

The initial setup was very complex and complicated. They have a very simple installation for Windows, but for Linuxware, it is far too complicated.

Deployment took almost two months.

The pricing is fair.

To be honest, I regret using MSTR. I think I should have gone with Tablo instead.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give MSTR a rating of seven.

The technical support is quite good.

We have a global scale business, where we're doing reporting on a global scale. We also have local businesses, where the countries have to report in their own local data warehouse and so on. They can all use MicroStrategy, however, I would say that MicroStrategy is a very good fit for global reporting. Their reports are excellent and thorough.

For global reporting, it's something that we're going to keep to report to senior management on a global level across all the 50 countries. 

The user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills.

What I think it could be very useful to have is quick measures, where it automatically brings you, let's say, three default calculations. It will be very useful and it will be very, very important maybe for the future for Power BI to have more additional quick measures there. Instead of the user having to think about, "okay, how am I going to calculate this measure? How I'm going to meet this measure?" If you already have a list of all the measures there in the quick measures, it'll make the life of the end-user much easier.

The solution is lacking some of the interactions that Tableau or Power BI offers. They have visualization points. They have good process cubes and a semantic layer on that point. However, I think they are missing the parts of user-friendliness. 

There needs to be better integration with other platforms. You can connect to several sources, but then you cannot integrate it into the suite that maybe Microsoft offers or other products offer. That said, everything depends on where your company wants to drive the business in the future. 

The end-user interaction is lacking. It's not as intuitive as Power BI is, or, in certain cases, Tableau is on virtualizations.

It's not interactive. There's a lot of filters on the page. 

The solution's reports are not very flexible.

Using this solution means that a company will need to find people with special skills. It's very difficult. When you're trying to find someone with a skill maybe in Tableau, Power BI, or Sapio, it's much easier because there are a lot of people like that in the market. Even if you're looking for a data scientist, it's very difficult to find a suitable candidate due to the fact that they have to have skills in MicroStrategy. If you don't have a resource that really understands the tool, then it will lose the purpose.

The solution should be re-designed so there is less coding and more drag and drop functionality.

The organization has been using the solution for a long time. I've been in this company for a year. However, even before my time, they' were still using MicroStrategy. They may have used the solution for eight years or more.

On the point of the semantic layer, yes, they are very strong on the question of stability. However, you need to have people that specialize in SQL, that really are specialized in MicroStrategy, that they really understand how the tool works. 

The company bought 40,000 licenses. Globally they are using the product. On the sales report, everything is being done in MicroStrategy. We are trying to change the approach because we also to centralize the data somehow. Due to that, we're actually trying to minimize the usage, not to increase it.

We will reduce the volume of licenses in the future.

That said, we're a sizeable company, and in order to grow, you really just need more licenses, therefore, in that sense, it can scale well.

From my understanding, from my colleagues who use MicroStrategy, the technical support is fine. We've been satisfied with their level of service.

The companies that I worked previously were using Power BI and Tableau and Sapio as business intelligence tools. Currently, I'm largely focused on MicroStrategy.

I'm not aware of how the process went in the organization. I only began working in the organization one year ago, and this solution was already embedded in the company.

What I'm trying to do is to switch some of the things from MicroStrategy to Power BI in the organization, due to the fact that MicroStrategy may fit for some points, but it's not intuitive for your typical end-user customer.

I'm trying to evaluate what MicroStrategy can do and possibly what Power BI can do. I think Microsoft has a strong point, maybe, on the semantic layer side, whereas Power BI has a strong visualization and transformation part. The question now is if the two tools can coexist. Let's say if you can connect Power BI directly to the semantic layer of MicroStrategy and drive the reporting capabilities from there. That would be an option for the business and something we're looking into.

In Power BI, you have, for example, a performance analyzer. It means that the user can switch the visuals. MicroStrategy doesn't have that and neither does Tableau. It's something really only specific to Power BI. Let's say that you have a bar chart. You, as an end-user, can change it to a tonal chart. You can format the end report as you like and save it as a bookmark, so everything you open the report you see it as your view. 

We have a business relationship with the solution.

At the moment, the company is using the 2019 version of the solution. We may plan to move to the 2020 version, however, I don't know when this will happen.

The company I work for uses MicroStrategy and Power BI quite a bit, although I have used other BI tools in the past.

Of course, the company is considering a move more towards Power BI. I was hired by the company to introduce Power BI to the organization. But at the same time, there are some strong values in them continuing to use MicroStrategy. So the question is now, to try to understand where the two tools can coexist. From my perspective, in an organization, the solution always has at least two business intelligence tools. They should not only have one. It depends on the business needs in the future.

The only compellation between Power BI and MicroStrategy is that on the MicroStrategy part has a strong semantic layer on it. The disadvantage is that the user has to have SQL knowledge and SQL skills. Where in Power BI, it's very inclusive, I'd say, for the end-user. He doesn't have to have SQL knowledge, he can just maybe have an understanding of Excel and so on, and he can create several connectivities to different sources and build the thing.

While mostly this solution is on-premises, if we move to Power BI, it will be on the cloud.

The ideal situation for us would be if you could combine the Power Query from Power BI, the integration visuals from Power BI, and the personalization of the visuals from Power BI into MicroStrategy, then maybe that can work for MicroStrategy. 

They have a good data module. There's still a lot of SQL there. I think they should start to think maybe to adjust to zero-code or no coding. They should introduce drag and drop functionality, and maybe more quick measures compilations instead of doing a lot of things in the backend SQL. They should do something on a design front. It really needs to be more intuitive for the end-user, and drag and drop would help with that. 

I'd rate the solution overall five out of ten, simply because you do need to be quite specialized din order to use it effectively.

The solution is primarily used for customer management, Salesforce organization, and product purchasing analysis. 

The solution has excellent features available on mobile.

Their subscriptions are very good.

The solution offers us a strong SQL engine and enterprise tools.

Overall, the solution offers a strong set of features.

The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern.

They could improve the maps they have on offer.

There needs to be more customization in the SQL engine.

The technical support on offer could be better.

I've been using the solution for ten years.

The solution offers very good stability. We find it to be reliable. there aren't bug or glitches. There isn't freezing. It doesn't crash.

The scalability the product offers is excellent. If a company want to expand outwards, they can do so with relative ease.

The technical support is okay. It could use some improvement. We aren't overly satisfied with their level of service.

The initial setup is not straightforward or complex. It has a moderate amount of difficulty.

I cannot disclose our licensing costs due to privacy concerns.

We're partners with MicroStrategy.

We're using the MSQL 2019 version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.

The primary use case of the solution is for management reporting and analytics across many different subject areas.

It's an information delivery mechanism to pull all of our data into one central tool, allowing us to look at key metrics across the organization.

The most valuable features are the scalability and management reporting.

They need to do a better job in its ability to allow end-users to produce their own reports, metrics, and self-service business intelligence.

MicroStrategy is a complex tool and you need to have a MicroStrategy architect. 

In the next release, I would like to see better visualization and more service audience or functionality.

I have been using MicroStategy for ten years.

They have recently changed the version numbering and they go by years now. We are using version 2019 in the cloud.

It's very stable and we have not experienced any issues.

This solution is the most scalable BI platform in the world. There is no other BI platform that is in its class. We have used all of them.

It's used by our analysts, our franchises, and by our executives.

We have 40 users inside the company and 4,000 users outside the company.

We plan to increase the usage of MicroStrategy. We are probably going to go as high as 8,000 users.

We don't leverage technical support a lot because we have our technical resources on-site, but if we do call them, they are good at responding.

Previously, the main solutions that we used were Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, and Amazon Quick Site.

We were using Oracle OBIEE, which is a Business Intelligence Enterprise. We moved from OBIEE to MicroStrategy.

The set up takes a while, but once it's set up it's an automatic mode.

We hired someone that had the consulting experience and became our permanent team member.

We have the best pricing available, but we can't disclose that information.

We have two ways of using this solution. We have an SSBI, which is self-service intelligence. We also have an enterprise-class, where we publish everything on the web, from tablets to phones, for our end-user base who are franchises.

It is the best for large scale deployments, but you cannot become a MicroStrategy shop without having the right technical resources on the team.

Don't even think about it, if you don't want to spend the money for the right person.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available for the relevant stuff you can use to link the relevant data.

The areas that have room for improvement in MicroStrategy are mainly related to building additional tools. Specifically, the embedding process has been a bit of a struggle. It's crucial to correctly populate the embedded components, especially considering my work in the banking environment. For instance, in the banking environment, there are branches in different regions. If you don't necessarily do it in the necessary SQL operations to populate the data, it becomes difficult to build an embedded React app or any other application. So, that's definitely an area for improvement.

So, we can list additional customization options as one of the improvement areas.

Additionally, I feel that the pricing is a little bit too expensive. That is the main reason why people are not using MicroStrategy in South Africa.

In the next release, I believe the additional customization options can help the product. Also, the pricing is too costly currently. Even that can be worked upon.

I have used MicroStrategy for about a year. We currently use version 11. 

We did not have any stability issues. So, I would rate MicroStrategy a ten out of ten.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. Within our banking organization, around 300 plus users are using MicroStrategy.

When it comes to technical support, we did have some issues. We waited a long time for someone from the support team to get back to us. 

Neutral

The deployment process took less than a month. However, being in the banking environment, there are numerous processes involved that can impact the actual deployment timeline, etcetera.

We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly. So, as for the pricing, I would rate it three out of ten, where one is high price, and ten is low price.

MicroStrategy is a nice tool to have. The support, the visualization, and everything else are very nice. In fact, it is more enhanced than Microsoft Power BI.

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

We use it for statistics for our customers.

The solution makes it easier for self-service.

The pricing could be lower because it is costly. They could also provide some features that Tableau offers. Microsoft has development features regarding schema objects and some integrations.

Tableau is more user-friendly, and MicroStrategy could improve specific visualizations, short card metrics, graphs and functionalities. In addition, it would be good to have year-to-year comparisons using transformations.

We have been using this solution since 2007. We are using the latest version, and we always update the versions. We use on-premises and are currently shifting to Google Cloud Platform.

It is a very stable solution. However, the tool could have easier optimization. We are used to creating cubes, but if the query is too large, our administrators in the databases abort the query. That is why we need to be able to optimize and have a good response time.

It is a scalable solution.

The technical support is helpful. They are testing some issues regarding the metadata when one of the columns gets duplicated. They take the schema for us and divide it. It takes a while, but they help us because it is hard for us to do it ourselves.

Our clients use Tableau, QuickView and PowerBI, but we use MicroStrategy at our company.

Our infrastructure department takes care of the implementation. There are some drawbacks to the shift. MicroStrategy is also scaling.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis. In addition, it offers some features that are better than Tableau and Data Studio.

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.

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.