MicroStrategy Reviews

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.

Predictive analysis with R, reporting and dashbaords.

With the advent of the partitioning concept in Cube partitioning, predictive analysis with visualizations, our organization is able to win back customers and customer appreciation.

• Its Cube performance
• Can be easily integrated to D3
• Can be easily integrated with third-party tools/products

Data writeback, and on-the-fly predictive analysis results from R and Python.

Cube publish time exponentially increases with MicroStrategy Cube size. Also, it has been observed that the Cube data gets unloaded from MicroStrategy's Cube cache resulting in reports and dashboards being impacted, having no data when executed.

With Cube partition (v10.1 and above) scalability has not been an issue, but the Cube publish time, and temporary space consumption while the Cube is being published, has almost doubled during implementation of Cube partition.

I would rate tech support seven out of 10, in terms of response and issue resolution.

We used SSRS reports, but the performance and visualization were always an issue.

Initial setup is bit of complex, this being an enterprise tool. It has three main components: Desktop, Web development, and Intelligence Server, and each has to be installed separately.

Before going ahead with MicroStrategy, we evaluated Tableau and QlikView, but in terms performance, data handling, and stability, we found this product scored highest. In fact, Tableau and QlilView are less stable and in no way match the Cube (cached data) functionality offered by MicroStrategy. A single report/dashboard can be created by pulling information from multiple cached data (called Cubes).

Our primary use case is to use for the self-service analytics and data sense, mostly in terms of the analytical platform.

We cannot measure in terms of values or pounds. However, it definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it.

We are looking forward to distributing personalized alerts to our users using the native mobile push notification systems. We will also eventually configure our mobile apps to work offline.

• Visual Insight; now Dossiers
• Its robust, analytical predictor
• How we can enable program leaders, so they can be enabled to do their own jobs rather than depending on IT.
• We are using MicroStrategy's Writeback capabilities for retail.

Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem in general.

Needs more visual essence and connectors for the ecosystems, which would be easy to use. Easy to use in corporate and to implement in the ecosystem, and not too complex in terms of implementing and enabling, then that is what we will do.

Stability is good.

Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience. 

Technical support is knowledgeable. The right person gets back to us whenever we email them. I would rate them as an eight out of 10, most of the time.

No.

The initial setup is in-between straightforward and complex. It is not too complex.

We did it on our own, but sometimes we had some challenges, such as you do not know how it will react. This is one of the things which comes with usability. We would try to reach out to technical support for their help when this happened.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We look for their capabilities, what they have developed, and what they are up to in terms of innovation and creativity. Mostly, we consider that if you are creative, you can do anything.

We use it mostly for the operational reporting. We also use it for the insurance claims and how to track them. 

The product is working fine. We feel they understand the healthcare system. 

The features of the product have definitely been beneficial. We do plan to roll out MicroStrategy Self-Service to our business teams.

We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform, like MicroStrategy provides, because it is easier. The customer gets to use one type of tool, then sticks with it. The customers are looking for Geospatial in 2018, so that is where we will be using it.

We have been using it mostly for grid reports and its exporting features. We are going to start using the Geospatial, which is a new feature. We are also looking forward to the 10.9 and 10.10 features coming out. 

We have not invested nor are we planning to invest in MicroStrategy's mobile platform.

It is a very stable solution, meaning the application is very good. MicroStrategy works very well.

It is highly scalable. We have quite a few customers who are the users themselves. They use it and have not had any issues yet. 

I sometimes use technical support. When I do, I have found them to be helpful. The right person answers me when I contact them.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

However, I have been involved in upgrades of the solution, which were mostly straightforward.

The vendor technical support assisted in the upgrades.

This is definitely a solution worth investing in. It will be useful for the long term. Anyone who is researching similar solutions should look for the longer term.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The technical capability.
• They are able to deliver it.
• They understand the product. 

Mobile, Visual Insights, reporting and subscriptions with alerts.

From my experience, I see that it is definitely more useful for businesses to make effective decisions from the data used. One example I can recall is in healthcare, where it helps businesses to see hospital/facility level inflow/outflow information on a mobile device in real time fashion, and make decisions accordingly to improve the business.

Some of the basic features such as Axis Label formatting on Graphs, Quick Switch on mobile (iOS), properly updated documentation on their websites, and faster enhancement fixes when needed for customers/businesses that are simple in nature rather than holding it for longer durations to fix.

I've been using it for five years.

There are times where the installation cause problems – but those could be avoiding if we know the process or certified/supported items before doing it.

I would rate it as average as enhancements and defect fixes takes years or months to implement. Other than that, their turn around on issues will be quicker depending on the priority of ticket.

I’ve used Qlikview and Tableau – which is good in self service than enterprise delivery. I love MicroStrategy as it has full depth BI functionality inside right from Admin to End Users scalability. Hence, MicroStrategy is the best solution I have used to date.

It was straightforward to me and now they have made it much easier in v10.x with express install and a static licence key rather than updating it on every sub release within the versions.

I have done both as a vendor team and also in-house for my own organization. My advice is to read the complete install and upgrade guide that the product provides. This will help you to have a better implementation than doing it without this knowledge.

They should make it cheaper and add more value to the product by resolving small issues that are very key to businesses. Other than that, the current pricing and licensing model is good.

Understand your business needs and budget. In order decide whether or not to get this tool you need to know your the vision that will eventually help in growing your business.

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.

I have been using MicroStrategy for the last 10 years in the health sector in private healthcare, designing reports and scorecards for healthcare and billing areas, with health indicators including monthly and annual accumulators compared to the last few years.

I developed reports that were distributed daily by email to heads of departments and directors of hospitals of the company, with the information of each of them.

With the MicroStrategy reports, we got the directors of each hospital and each department to have daily information on the status of each center, with the time evolution, to make decisions based on real data and take corrective measures against trends in activity or billing, analyzing niches of activity or specialties that show seasonality.

MicroStrategy incorporates in itself a set of tools and utilities of incredible analysis that greatly facilitate the construction of elaborated reports.

The evolution of MicroStrategy in its latest versions facilitates the construction of objects, although it still allows the definition of schemes in the projects that give the reports a lot of functionality in navigation (drill-down), filters, ...

It is essential to have a good project partner in the beginning with MicroStrategy to be able to use their full potential. It is not a work tool that can be controlled in 2 days (triggers, attributes, derived metrics, transformations, etc) but I can assure you that there has not been any project that you have tried with MicroStrategy that has not been a success.

Great!

Good.

No, I didn't. 

It is very difficult to quantify the possibility of having the information analyzed from a large company with data from the previous day and some in real time. For me, the ROI is total since the first report was sent.

It is important to make an analysis of consumer users of reports that will interact with MicroStrategy because it is what most will condition the investment. It is necessary to take into account the training of the architects and designers of the project to try to internalize them since the dependence of a third party can be very expensive in the medium-long term.

No, we didn't. Currently, we have other tools that coexist with MicroStrategy (Power BI) but there are certain reports that by volume and functionality, we continue to develop them in Microstrategy.

For me, it's the best tool for BI.

Primary is the enterprise reporting. That's our baseline. Everything else is "nice-to-haves."

It performs very well.

If you provide the necessary data to make decisions in a timely and visually stimulating way, then you can make better decisions. It profoundly impacts the organization.

It's such a rich platform, it's got so much to offer: it's mobile, In-Memory Analytics, and there are data connectors to just about everything you can imagine. It's a total package.

If they didn't do their enterprise reporting very well then it wouldn't be as successful.

I would say what's unique is that it's a comprehensive package, and wasn't done piecemeal. It was built internally. They didn't buy products and stitch them together. Everything works really well together. It's such a powerful platform and I've worked with it for a long time. It's amazing that I still continue to learn and discover new things even to this day.

We have rolled out self-service to business teams. Data governance is the biggest challenge.

Looking forward, for this year, mobility is something I think we'll utilize most. We're currently on the mobile platform but we're looking to use it more. It's going to continue to be a strong push.

I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing. 

Also, there are minor features, that I've already logged with MicroStrategy, nothing major.

It's one of the most stable platforms I've ever worked on. I've never had it fall on me, never.

It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now.

The only problem with that - yes it's a cluster, they raised it from four to eight - but your jobs aren't distributed. Your job goes to a single server - one of the eight. If you have a really huge job, it'd be nice to distribute it across all eight and cut the response time significantly.

They're actually pretty good. It's support, it's a difficult job. They're actually really good.

Windows implementation is pretty straightforward. Linux is pretty easy. High-level, it's very easy.

Take the time to find an experienced consultant. A good consultant can increase your adoption and lower your overall cost by saving you from costly missteps.

I would prefer having analytic capabilities from a single platform, rather than from many-point solutions, but in reality, I don't think that's very possible. 

I can give you an example. MicroStrategy, was very early to do In-Memory Analytics. I think everybody else is catching up to that. It doesn't really set them apart anymore today, but it did at one time. But beyond that, with MicroStrategy you're still limited to a single server, and to really crunch through a lot of data you need to parallel, across servers. MicroStrategy doesn't currently offer that so you have to go to something like Spark.

So I would love that on one platform, but in reality you can't get everything you possibly want in one platform. But MicroStrategy is smart. They have data connectors to open source applications. That may provide the functionality that you need to fill in the gaps.

Most important when selecting a vendor is 

• the support 
• their stability, are they going to be here tomorrow
• release schedule, a fairly stable, consistent, high-value release schedule.

I give MicroStrategy a nine out of 10. It's pretty solid. It's not perfect, but it's pretty solid. I think it is probably the best solution out there right now.

Do your homework. Shop around. Really understand MicroStrategy and the alternatives. Do enough research to realize where the real value is at. It's a mature product, it's a mature suite. It's more than just pretty dashboards. If you look past that, the administration, mobility, the analytics, if you look at all of it and rate each of the categories, I think you'll realize that MicroStrategy is at the top of the list.

There is a steep learning curve with it, a skill set that goes with it. But they've balanced that with the new Data Discovery module that is fairly easy to use by anyone.