What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?

There is a need to improve the automatic generation of metrics in MicroStrategy, as currently everything must be done manually. Additionally, the hierarchy creation process in MicroStrategy could be improved.

There is room for improvement in data visualization. Compared to other BI tools like Power BI, MicroStrategy is stronger in data utilization but could be enhanced in the visualization aspect.

I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging.

The solution provider should take some initiatives to grow the MicroStrategy community because, presently, it's quite small, and I wasn't able to find a solution to my problem by searching in the community. MicroStrategy can offer user-friendly training through platforms such as YouTube. Recently, at our company, the features we were able to utilize in the developer tool were not there in the workstation; such issues can be resolved through training videos or learning content distribution from MicroStrategy. The solution provider is presently promoting the workstation on the cloud instead of the developer tool, so there should be relevant resources for learning about the product. MicroStrategy is also working on integrating AI technology into its product. The object migration process from one environment to another using the solution is somewhat complex. It involves package creation, dependency, and transportation. But the migration process is rather simpler in OBIEE, where reports need to be archived in one system and unarchived in another, for example, from Dev to SID.

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.

MicroStrategy, for me, it's the visualization and user-friendliness that needs improvement. When compared to Power BI and Tableau, that's their sweet spot. They're super easy to pick up and use. Plus, they've got this cool association feature that updates when you change the timeframe. But with MicroStrategy, there's a lot of room for improvement, especially in integrating with developed mobile solutions using MicroStrategy. We struggled to deploy to iOS, and the Android adaptation was a big challenge for us. Everything that worked in iOS wouldn't work in Android, and videos and calendars were a whole other mess. So, user-friendliness for non-technical users and mobile performance on Android, particularly in India, where it's the dominant platform, those are my two big areas for improvement.

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.

What I need are clear pricing details and a better understanding of the licensing policies. There might be opportunities for reporting or data analysis, perhaps even in the realm of simulation.

There is room for improvement in customer support. Another area of improvement is stability of this solution.

The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation.

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.

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.

MicroStrategy needs to work on visualization and get closer to what Tableau or ThoughtSpot provides. They need to simplify the process involved when new objects are created. It currently requires updating the schema which takes time. In the next version, I'd like to see the inline processing of Python script that Tableau has and it would be great if they could introduce the Natural Language Processing feature that ThoughtSpot has implemented.

Data preparation-wise, it was not so straightforward with respect to getting different sources. Preparing or transforming the data inside and then bringing it onto the dashboard was a bit difficult, and the experience could have been better.

Preparation, data loading, and data management application are challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics, or MMA deployment.

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

MicroStrategy should become more user friendly. It should behave more like Tableau. I would personally like to see more narrowcast features.

The flexibility to work with agile data model updates.

MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support.

I would like to see more integration.

I would like to see the enterprise version available in a demo or as a trial version. It is the companies policy that we are not permitted to use any cloud solution in my company unless it is owned by the company, because we provide cloud solutions for others unless it is not provided. It comes down to enabling R&D for any individual. It would be helpful to have an Enterprise version for non-enterprise organizations, for people like me who are trying to conduct test studies. As we are self-dependent study persons, my colleagues and I are required to do them. If I want to do something between myself and my colleagues, I have to go to my company's premises and use the companies resources. They allow us but it is frustrating because I can't do this if I'm doing something personal.

MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people.

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.

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

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.

They should give proper industry-based tutorials so that one can learn it easily and implement it based on the requirements. They should give more MMP files so that we can import a whole project altogether and learn from that project.

It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 would like to see a single standalone application to control everything from the administration perspective, and also to develop new applications.

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.

I would like to see enhanced features in the dashboards. This would enhance the solution in the future, and is currently missing.

The product could be improved by adding additional visualization. Also, another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops. In addition, continued development of mobile reporting.

If you compare it with Power BI with the DAX language, it would be great to put that into MicroStrategy.

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.