MicroStrategy Reviews

Our primary use case for MicroStrategy is reporting, including sales, marketing, operational, and financial. We use it for all of our lines of business. 

The tool I find the most valuable is MicroStrategy Architect. I use it for schematic modeling. It is scalable and integration-friendly. 

MicroStrategy should become more user friendly. It should behave more like Tableau. 

I would personally like to see more narrowcast features. 

I have been using MicroStrategy for six years. 

The initial setup was complex because of the nature of the product. It has multiple components. It takes 12 hours to deploy. 

When we were using it before, it was mainly for some types of reporting, primarily sales reporting. We also use it for external reporting and that went out to our customers to allow our member hospitals to view their own purchasing data, for example, who they're buying from, what vendors, what kind of pricing they're getting. Mostly its reports on things of that nature. It was and is used for both internal reporting and external member facing reporting.

We moved to Tableau and we're still using it a little bit for some of our solutions.

The security is quite robust. It is more of a true enterprise solution. That made it much easier to deploy out at the time to our members. 

The common metadata, the library that MicroStrategy has made, makes it much easier to reuse components and not have to recreate them for every dashboard. That was something we really liked and still do.

The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution.

Overall, we found the solution to be quite stable.

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.

We've been using the solution for 20 years or so. It's been a very long time. We have a lot of experience with it.

Overall, we were really happy with it. As far as an enterprise solution goes, it was very stable. It was very mature and had many robust features, as far as building applications and alerting, et cetera. The thresholding just had a very robust feature set, which is what we liked about it.

We didn't really deal with bugs and glitches. It didn't crash and freeze. It was very reliable for many years.

The solution is well suited to enterprise-level companies. 

We are currently using Tableau. It's less expensive.

The initial setup was done a very long time ago. We had a third-party help us when we first implemented it back in the 90's. 

Since then, we have managed it ourselves. 

We did hire a third-party to assist us in the implementation process when we first set the solution up.

We are just a customer and end-user.

We are using the 2019 version of the solution.

I used to run a consulting company and we would consult on this solution. I would always recommend to our customers that they get a third-party to help them implement it initially due to the fact that the learning curve to implement MicroStrategy is much steeper than something like a Tableau.

Since we moved away from MicroStrategy, they've really gained traction on their visualizations and it's much more similar to a Tableau design now, as far as building visualizations. That was the only thing really lacking for us. It's good that they've moved in this direction.

Technically, we are still using the solution, just at a reduced scale.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Design and development of the product lines in the apparel industry with its unit pricing info,customer demographics details,Customer profile,competitor info and analysis over a time period..Store wise inventory details of each product line across the region,state and country level

• Enterprise wide reporting capability.
• Self-service reporting & analysis.
• Extensive analysis of business units function: It provides various metrics and by using drill through and drill across functionality.
• Ease of understanding of various performance measures using widget features.

Schema updates help us to cope up with enterprise business definition changes.

Reports auto-styling allows us to design stunning report output, differentiating the result set for better understanding of the business users.

VLDB properties allow you to customize the SQL that MicroStrategy generates. These settings affect how MicroStrategy Intelligence Server manages joins, metric calculations, and query optimizations.

The flexibility to work with agile data model updates.

We have used MicroStrategy for 10 + years.

We have encountered stability issues with regards to Metadata db being crashed and need to reload the Project and configure it to various Project repositories

We have encountered no scalability issues.

Technical support is very good.

We worked with IBM Cognos and its business adaption due to its rich data visualization capabilities, widget creation, etc.

Setup was easy. By creating a unified project model with the organizational standards, business rules, and project design, the underlying data model design is streamlined resulting in consistent reporting and analysis across the enterprise.

It’s cloud version pricing is competitive and in sync with market demand.

For an enterprise-wide DWBI implementation, MicroStrategy is a great choice. Evaluate your organizational needs to go in either for on-premises or cloud version of the product to control your project budget.

We create dashboards and reports for top management.

It is very stable.

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. 

I have been using MicroStrategy for one year.

It is very stable.

I have been using it only for a year. I am not sure about its scalability. We have ten users who use it in our organization.

There is no proper support. Their support needs to be improved. Whenever we call them, they ask us to get professional services. I previously took professional services for $2,000. When I reached out to them for another issue, they again asked me to go for professional services. I cannot pay for professional services every now and then.

I didn't use any other product before. I was just using a dashboard that I made through PHP programming. 

It was very complicated. I was installing the MSTR library on Linux. It took me two months. It is very easy to install MSTR on Windows.

I installed it on my own.

They offer yearly as well as perpetual licenses.

I am not satisfied with this solution. I would rate MicroStrategy a seven out of ten.

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.

We are using MicroStrategy in development and also for the web.

For our customers, Dossier is the latest for innovation and we like it a lot.

It's user-friendly, also the MTDI cube is a very good approach, as it helps you to use the pre-format instead of using the standard objects from the schema of MicroStrategy. It allows you to do more than the standard object.

We use a lot of data sources, and MicroStrategy allows us to use external data sources. This is very helpful. For example, we can connect to BigQuery, Oracle, and several other platforms.

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 have been working with this solution for thirteen years.

The tool is stable and scalable. We are testing each upgrade and even if some issues appear, hey are not show stoppers and our existing solutions are not afected.

We have an in-house team for deployment.

We have a license with packages, and there are additional costs for extra components.

I am a user and don't have all of the information regarding licenses and how they are acquired. I know this is a special contractual relationship between our managers and the team in the USA.

I am certified in MicroStrategy 9 and 10 for data analysis and as a report developer.

We are trying to connect MicroStrategy and Data Studio to the Google Cloud Platform. We prefer MicroStrategy and are trying to convince clients to switch.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am a consultant and I use this solution to assist in delivering projects.

This solution has allowed us to become a top-class competitor among other consulting companies.

The most valuable features are the self-service and the pixel-perfect dashboards.

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