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MicroStrategy vs Yellowfin comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

MicroStrategy
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
12th
Ranking in Embedded BI
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
162
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Yellowfin
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
35th
Ranking in Embedded BI
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (22nd), Data Visualization (24th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of MicroStrategy is 1.3%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
MicroStrategy1.3%
Yellowfin0.8%
Other97.9%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

AS
Lead Software Engineer at Momentus
Provides strong data visualization and security while easing deployment across multiple sectors
The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis in my experience are the security, the metadata management, and the administration, along with the options of different workarounds available to accommodate different types of requirements. MicroStrategy's data visualization capabilities are great, and I would rate them nine out of 10.
AC
‎IS Executive at SAINS
It is a central source of up-to-date data and information, but needs more charting capabilities
Management information Reporting Statistics Data analysis It reduces sending copies of different report/spreadsheet versions over email, which makes it difficult to access the right report. It is also able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout.  All management…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications."
"The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy."
"The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects."
"The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports."
"The power of this tool represents the best features MicroStrategy offers in my experience, and I find building reports enjoyable because the internal code of MicroStrategy is very easy to understand and build."
"I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for."
"There are people who are using MicroStrategy as transaction services."
"It definitely impacts people, who are excited to use it."
"It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis."
"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
 

Cons

"They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that."
"Needs ​tighter mapping integration."
"I would like to see more integration."
"Sometimes, it has become too complex to upgrade and adjust to the ecosystem.​"
"I know we are not competing against Tableau, but MicroStrategy needs to step up its game on the GUI side.​"
"Lacks decent visualization and the process for creating new objects needs to be simplified."
"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."
"​There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have a license with packages, and there are additional costs for extra components."
"The pricing for MicroStrategy is always on the higher side. They should seriously start thinking about their pricing and licensing strategy."
"They offer yearly as well as perpetual licenses."
"There is no subscription, I am using the free version."
"Now, the price is high."
"They can improve its licensing. It is a bit expensive as compared to Microsoft and other tools."
"For larger businesses, the pricing is logical."
"They need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects. We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them."
Information not available
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Insurance Company
7%
Educational Organization
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
11%
Transportation Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about MicroStrategy?
The stability of the product is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MicroStrategy?
My company has many licenses for MicroStrategy because we can build reports in this tool. I don't know what the cost is for these licenses.
What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?
I don't have any issues with MicroStrategy and would not suggest how it can be improved. I would not change anything because it's a great tool to build reports. I would appreciate improvements in M...
Ask a question
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.
NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores
Find out what your peers are saying about MicroStrategy vs. Yellowfin and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.