I use MicroStrategy for reporting purposes because I have worked across different organizations in different domains, including retail, mortgage, and banking.

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.

Areas of MicroStrategy that have room for improvement include pricing because it is costly. Organizations that are well-established and have more money can afford MicroStrategy, but startups and mid-level organizations who do not have this much budget have to opt for other cheaper tools.

I have close to 14 years of experience working with MicroStrategy.

The deployment of MicroStrategy used to take hours, but now it takes a few minutes because everybody is using the cloud, so it is already pre-deployed there. We just need to connect with our data and deploy our metadata, and that completes the process.

I would rate the stability of MicroStrategy as nine out of 10.

I rate the scalability of MicroStrategy as eight out of 10.

I would rate the technical support from MicroStrategy as nine out of 10.

Positive

Before MicroStrategy, I used a bit of Power BI and also Tableau.

I find the initial setup of MicroStrategy to be straightforward.

My deployment of MicroStrategy was done in-house, not by using a third party such as an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

I switched from these tools to MicroStrategy because when we evaluated all the capabilities and the feasibility that we got in MicroStrategy, it was way better than the other tools.

There are about 2,500 plus users using MicroStrategy in my organization.

I have experience working with solutions such as MicroStrategy, Power BI, and a bit of Tableau, but not on ThoughtSpot.

My relationship with the vendor is that I am an end user of this solution.

I would rate MicroStrategy overall as nine out of 10.

I am a database developer with experience using both MicroStrategy and Microsoft Power BI. I usually recommend MicroStrategy to my customers. I work at a service company.

The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis are those that cater to user needs. However, I find Power BI to be more useful when comparing some features, but my company does not choose Power BI due to certain code restrictions. The MicroStrategy interface is not as good as Power BI, especially concerning the user-friendly aspects.

MicroStrategy could learn from Power BI's user-friendly interface. I find the user interface lacking when compared to Power BI. 

Additionally, their hyperintelligence could be improved in certain aspects.

I have been familiar with MicroStrategy for two years.

I find MicroStrategy works fine. It is stable.

I find MicroStrategy works fine. It is scalable.

I consider Power BI to be more useful than MicroStrategy for some features.

This review will be published on PeerSpot and made available to other users and product websites. When I receive a link, I will be able to make the necessary changes myself. 

I would rate MicroStrategy seven out of ten due to the interface and other mentioned aspects.

I am a developer working with MicroStrategy, specifically focusing on tasks related to making cubes and viewpoints. Although I am not involved in solution architecture, I utilize MicroStrategy as an end user, working within its provided framework.

MicroStrategy saves time and money for repetitive tasks, streamlining certain processes within our organization.

The most valuable feature of MicroStrategy is the ability to make your own cubes and, from those, create viewpoints. This is particularly useful in data analytics where cube making goes hand in hand.

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.

I have been personally working with MicroStrategy for approximately 12 years.

I would rate the stability of MicroStrategy eight out of ten. The product is generally stable.

I rate the scalability of MicroStrategy as seven out of ten. We have faced some challenges, such as a lack of optimization in the data model, which affects its ability to scale efficiently.

The customer service and support for MicroStrategy are satisfactory. We have a certain agreement with them and have consultants available who respond promptly.

Positive

I didn't evaluate other solutions prior to using MicroStrategy.

I am not working directly with the BI architecture aspect of MicroStrategy, so the setup process comes to me already finished. Therefore, I cannot comment on whether it is simple or complex.

Based on my experience, I can recommend MicroStrategy for enterprise-level companies. It efficiently handles around five thousand users.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Our customers use it as a BI tool, and we handle end-to-end project development. We use MicroStrategy for the front end to develop metadata and dashboards.

MicroStrategy's OLAP data site is a significant advantage for BI tools. We are able to manage to get very in-depth and detailed management of the data model on the backend. It makes dashboards more powerful in terms of performance. It also enables more efficient data management.

Data Security and Multi-User Capabilities

MicroStrategy's security management is very powerful. We can use various security filters for role-based security and it has a direct connection to Active Directory, allowing us to manage numerous groups effectively.

AI Capabilities

I haven't had much chance to use the AI capabilities, but I know that only licensed parties can use these features.

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 have over five years of experience working with MicroStrategy as a developer. 

I would rate MicroStrategy's stability a ten out of ten, as it has been reliable for a long duration.

I would rate the scalability of MicroStrategy a nine out of ten.

User Base

We work with various customers, and the number of users varies. One customer has over 600 users, while another has less than 100. We cater to a range of customers, from small to enterprise businesses.

The customer service and support are good.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup of MicroStrategy an eight out of ten, with ten being the easiest.

We generally use on-premises deployment for MicroStrategy.

Deployment time: The deployment time varies. Installing MicroStrategy takes longer, but developing a dashboard or metadata can be done within a few hours. Developing from scratch would naturally take longer.

Integration Capabilities:

MicroStrategy's integration capabilities are also good. We can get data from APIs and other sources. There is also a library section. We can integrate with that kind of thing. Only the admin part can be challenging.

The deployment is handled in-house by our team, without the need for a third party.

Overall, I think MicroStrategy has positively impacted business efficiency.

For larger businesses, I think the pricing is logical, but for smaller companies, it can be a bit costly.

I would recommend MicroStrategy because it is very powerful from the backend modeling side.

Overall Rating:

Overall, I would rate MicroStrategy an eight out of ten.

I just maintain the platform and develop the reports.

MicroStrategy does have just standard reporting on them. Not more than that. A few mobile reports.

Learning curve: 

From the end-user perspective, it depends on how the report is designed. It's very easy to handle, like a regular website. 

For end-users developing self-service, the handling itself is easy as well, but the end-user has to have some knowledge of data, I mean data wrangling and stuff like that. Otherwise, you wouldn't know what to do. It's the same, like in Excel, for example. 

For developers, if someone already has some knowledge of data warehousing, it's not a big problem. It's just another content that you can learn.

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.

We have MicroStrategy in place for a couple of years, actually more than 15.  

It's quite stable, actually. We don't have a lot of issues with the platform. So it's good.

The data volume is not a problem because we have data warehouses. We only point to data warehouses where we have the data stored. 

So it's actually the distinct count of current users that would be necessary to scale up. But we don't have to cope with that right now.

We did have some issues over the years. One or two issues a year. We changed servers to the Unix platform. We had some troubles there. It was actually hard to find someone who has Unix experience with MicroStrategy. Because most of the staff had good knowledge with Windows, but not with Unix. So this was actually quite challenging. Once we had all the issues closed, it was stable then. But it took at least a few weeks.

We have different products like Oracle. We are trying to harmonize and switch to only one technology.

We are not developing something. We are just defining the target architecture. And after that, we will create a project for the transformation.

We already have a lot of experience, so for us it's not a hassle.

I was part of the in-house deployment. 

Not for all the deployments, but for the reports that we develop, we deploy them.

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. 

If you have data, it is not that complex. It's manageable even for end users. But most of the time, some source systems have a lot of tables. And so if you have to make some matrices, you need to know what to do and how to do it. So you need a little bit of experience. It really depends on which source systems you're reporting from and which users you have.

In our case, with our purpose and the skills we have, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

At our insurance product-based company, we are using MicroStrategy to develop organizational reports, including financial reports and other in-house project reports. 

The product simplifies and accelerates the attribute and maze creation process compared to OBIEE. The dossiers of MicroStrategy are more user-friendly than those of OBIEE. The visualization feature of MicroStrategy is also better than that of its competitors. 

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.  

I have been using MicroStrategy for a year.

I haven't witnessed any downtime or glitches with the solution, so it's a stable solution. 

I believe the solution is quite scalable. There are around 400 to 500 users of MicroStrategy in our organization.

Previously, our company was working with the on-prem deployment model of MicroStrategy, but now we have migrated to the cloud. 

I have worked with OBIEE as well, but the ideal product selection depends upon the model of business it will be implemented for. For instance, clients who will be building a manufacturing or services page for them OBIEE will be better than MicroStrategy. But for our company and similar insurance product-based organizations, MicroStrategy is more favorable and compatible with ATS like VScape. 

The Hyperintelligence feature of the solution has helped me create visual graph reports by inputting my requirements. 

The creation of projects and the importation of metadata are quite simple in MicroStrategy. I would overall rate the product a seven out of ten. I would recommend MicroStrategy to other users, especially for insurance-based businesses. 

From a data visualization perspective, I use the tool's ability in relation to chats and Esri maps, which is my most valuable feature. There are a lot more functionalities available in the product. Predominantly, I have experience in the area of ODBC when it comes to MicroStrategy.

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.

I have been using MicroStrategy for ten years. My company has a partnership with MicroStrategy.

The stability of the product is good.

The product can be scaled out to a certain extent, but it only depends on the requirements of the users.

I have contacted the solution's technical support. My company has a separate team to reach out to the product's support team. My team does not directly contact the tool's technical team. The product's support team has the ability to provide solutions to issues. I was satisfied with the responses provided by the product's support team.

I rate the product's support team a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have some limited exposure when it comes to Power BI.

For users to be able to use MicroStrategy, they need to have a clear understanding of the application part of the product. When it comes to Power BI, it is easier for users to create dashboards with the tool's self-service capabilities, but it won't be an easy process when it comes to MicroStrategy because they might need to rely on developers to help with the schema part, that user can develop a dashboard with the help of the schema that has been set up. With Power BI, it is easy to pull the data and directly consume it while using the dashboards without the help of any developers. The self-service part is more convenient in Power BI. In MicroStrategy, only if the scheme is built properly can the end users consume the data from the schema. Then, users have to be completely dependent on the developers in MicroStrategy. Power BI is very easy to configure, and you just can do fancy customizations, but in MicroStrategy, one requires skills to do the same, considering that it has a few limitations. The calculations of even complex or huge data can be easily dealt with when it comes to MicroStrategy. If a user has to deal with simple data sources with limited size, then Power BI is good, but MicroStrategy is better at dealing with large amounts of data.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product. For beginners, there are trial accounts that are provided by the product.

The product has improved areas like data analysis and reporting since I have used the product in domains like education and banking, where I found it to be useful for providing insightful data to our company's customers, especially those who are accessing multiple sources of data. With the tool, I was able to connect to different sources, consolidate, and provide a dashboard where the customers can analyze the data and make insightful business strategies. The tool has been really helpful for me to collate data from multiple sources.

Based on the domains my company works for with the tool, we provided different data visualization formats like charts or heat maps that allow users to understand data more easily than the normal legacy grades or tables. Through visualization tools, my company's customers were able to do analysis in a better and faster way compared to what they could have done using the legacy tools to share data.

The tool possesses abilities in the area of advanced analytics, but I haven't used it. Microstrategy HyperIntelligence cards are available, which can be used in the area of advanced analytics.

The performance issues in the product can be handled. Every tool has some performance issues, and it all depends on how users design it and how they consume the data, along with the maintained infrastructure. If everything is done properly, the performance issues related to the product can be resolved.

My company has access to the dashboard provided by the solution that we can configure and use on mobile phones.

The current project I am dealing with in my company does not require dashboards provided by the solution. Previously, I had used the dashboards provided by the solution in mobile phones. The dashboards are compatible with mobile phones and on websites. It is a bit tricky to have the layout of the dashboards configured on the website and the mobile phones, but it is manageable and possible.

I rate the overall tool a six to six and a half out of ten.

We use MicroStrategy for reporting on retail analytics, platform analytics, and tracking user usage.

Since it's an enterprise tool, MicroStrategy gives an end-to-end understanding of the system. The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave. At times, MicroStrategy comes in very handy to invoice the overall infrastructure. On the user adoption side, our business users find it very easy to use. The solution's dossier functionality comes in very handy.

The solution's licensing could be improved because its cost is heavy on the pockets. MicroStrategy's visualization is a little on the lower side as compared to Power BI and Tableau.

I have been using MicroStrategy for nine years.

MicroStrategy is a very stable solution. Even if there are any bugs, the support team is quite knowledgeable in resolving those usual product bugs.

The client that I'm working with has around 3,000 users for MicroStrategy.

The technical support team resolves all our queries, but they don't provide 24/7 support. I'm working from India, and my customer is in the US. Whenever I raise a ticket, I get the response one day later. The only area of improvement for the technical support team is they should provide 24/7 support.

Positive

MicroStrategy's installation is easier for the developer or the administrator but not for the IT person from the infrastructure team. If anyone knows MicroStrategy, they can install it. For someone who doesn't know about the solution, it's not a ready-to-be-installed tool, just like Power BI or Tableau. For MicroStrategy, you need an understanding of the product it comes with.

Organizations using MicroStrategy are seeing a return on their investment.

The solution’s licensing cost is expensive.

MicroStrategy is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

The client I'm working for already had MicroStrategy as a license. Secondly, MicroStrategy provides enterprise-level support. If I have a big enterprise, my choice of tool will always be something that is very stable.

Many analyses can be easily done on MicroStrategy, which is currently not possible in either Power BI or Tableau. Also, users are not ready to shift from one tool to another.

I would recommend that users analyze their requirements before choosing the solution. I would not suggest MicroStrategy to someone with just a visualization need. I would recommend MicroStrategy to users who want reporting and some analysis done on the fly. MicroStrategy is not just a visualization tool. It's a very powerful data analytic tool as well. Users with both data analysis and visualization needs should go for MicroStrategy.

The support team addresses all the problems that arise from MicroStrategy, including product bugs. The only downside is that it is heavier on the licensing cost part. Recently, MicroStrategy has brought AI features, which are also very costly on the licensing side. MicroStrategy is trying its best to match the current trend that we see in the market.

Overall, I rate MicroStrategy an eight out of ten

I was an architect and developed a BI solution, and I used the transaction feature in MicroStrategy, which lets you write to the database. We used that feature heavily.

Almost all the features are great, but I was particularly impressed by the enterprise features. Security, like how MicroStrategy stores user passwords and the performance, especially the queue. It was very powerful. 

So, the core features of MicroStrategy, enterprise security and performance, were what set it apart, especially compared to other products at the time. Maybe Power BI and Tableau have improved performance now, but back then, MicroStrategy was exceptional. 

And the ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good. 

And, the interactive chart features are all common and valuable.

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.

I have experience with this solution for around six years. It's still there. The company has still been using the products after I left.

The core technical stuff was great. But reaching them and getting a resolution took time. Once escalated to the India sales guy, things moved smoother. 

The challenge was providing them with proper context and materials. They'd ask for this or that; it took time. But their technical expertise was definitely good. 

We need to be patient with the initial communication and have the necessary infrastructure ready. We can't just throw production issues at them directly. We had to set up dedicated environments with management approval. But ultimately, they were supportive and did a good job.

In fact, they released platform updates for us in a couple of instances. Mobile and Android on MicroStrategy were always our biggest pain points, though. Device limitations meant they couldn't do everything.

Positive

We were mainly using Excel, but then I did evaluate Clickview, MicroStrategy, and Oracle's BI tool. This was around 2015-2016, so we weren't using Microsoft's BI solution yet. 

Clickview was actually pretty good back then, and Oracle was a natural choice since we were already an Oracle shop. 

But MicroStrategy won us over with its real-time data replication and data sharing capabilities. So, for the past 15-20 years, I've been working with Oracle solutions, including implementing data security policies and the like. 

And then, for the past few years, I've been managing our MicroStrategy deployment, which basically uses Microsoft's BI platform behind the scenes.

The implementation itself was pretty straightforward. The tricky part was understanding MicroStrategy's licensing model, which was a bit convoluted back then.  

MicroStrategy has simplified it now, though. But overall, the implementation took about a year for our developers and architects to get comfortable, which is fine. There was a bit of a learning curve. 

It's the user-friendliness compared to other BI products that gets me. Power BI and Tableau just feel more intuitive for non-technical users. So, MicroStrategy can be more user-friendly. 

Prices were competitive back then, like three or four years ago. Now, the price is high. But the bigger challenge was the lack of promotion for MicroStrategy in India. 

Products grow through word-of-mouth, like people like us talking about them, training, etc. Marketing in India wasn't great. MicroStrategy was strong in the US and Europe, but in India, they still haven't reached that critical mass. 

Very few people talk about MicroStrategy here. So, the price was high compared to others, but we got a very good discount. So, from that perspective, it's pricey compared to others, but that was three years ago. Things might have changed.

Excluding the mobile Android issues, I'd rate it a nine out of ten. But factoring in the mobile Android experience, it drops to a six out of ten.

Everyone seems to be focusing on AI and predictive analytics these days. Honestly, for India's readiness, the current features are mostly enough. 

The biggest challenge here is data quality and collection from various sources. The ETL part is crucial. If MicroStrategy could integrate with data sources better through partners, that would be a huge improvement. Technically, the product is good. Even Power BI had some performance issues when we tested it. But MicroStrategy's tools have generally been reliable for us.

We use it for reporting, it's enterprise-wide reporting. There are tons of different things, some scheduled by MicroStrategy. Those old-fashioned reports, PDFs, Excel, and even portfolio and task stuff. Works for many industries now, different business lines, finance, supply chain, etc.

MicroStrategy has become an obsolete product. It might still be around for another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years, but I wouldn't recommend using it for any specific use cases. Unless you already have a MicroStrategy license, in which case it might be worth sticking with MicroStrategy for cost reasons. However, I wouldn't buy new MicroStrategy licenses.

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.

I have been working with this solution for ten years. I worked with the cloud version of MicroStrategy.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten because MicroStrategy is generally stable, but every new version seems to have bugs.  

For scalability, I would rate the standard on-premises version, I'd rate a two out of ten. But the cloud version is a seven out of ten.

In Europe, I know of around 700 organizations. The US will have much more.

You can pay for customer service and get help with specific issues. They have different tiers of support, like first-line and so on. You submit a ticket and wait for a resolution. If it's simple, you might find some help. But for complex issues, they might just push it to the next product release.

So, overall, the support is pretty good. 

Positive

I currently use other tools like Business Objects, Power BI, SQL Server Reporting Services, and others.

I didn't choose MicroStrategy. It was already in place at my previous company, and I inherited it. 

It does require deployment, and with Azure's architecture, you need a central computing unit like MicroStrategy Intelligent Server. So, that must be installed and configured. 

Once it is set up, you can start integrating data into it and building dashboards. Setting this up takes time, but it has the advantage.

The advantage of this approach is the enterprise scale of the solution. You have time to carefully consider your implementation and follow a more waterfall-style approach, eliminating and minimizing errors. 

This is unlike some other solutions where you can start quickly with Excel files and move data into BI tools rapidly. While that's convenient for speed, it can lead to neglecting a solid, scalable approach for the future.

The deployment took around a couple of weeks. It takes around two weeks to configure everything. Moreover, setting up the project and defining the data sources and desired outcomes can also impact the timeline.

The Azure part has a publicly available flat pricing structure. But for the on-premises version, you negotiate directly with MicroStrategy. They're often willing to offer significant discounts, up to 80% off the original price. The pricing list itself is not publicly accessible, so it's a bit opaque.

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