We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and MicroStrategy based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Users gave Microsoft BI higher ratings. Compared to MicroStrategy, Microsoft BI has slightly better features, and users were happy with the ROI.
"The most valuable features of Microsoft BI are the variety of possibilities to connect to various data sources. The visualizations are easily done, have useful rollover functions, and there are continuous updates being made to the system. You can benefit from the various improvements."
"Good CS and administration."
"It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured."
"Provides good data flow related to the container and control flow."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"The solution is easy to set up and implement."
"The ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good."
"I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things."
"Visual Insights (VI)"
"The option to use various administrative tools, like Integrity Manager, is a valuable feature."
"Tech support has been great, very responsive. We usually hear back within a day. We usually email them and that works out perfect. The right person always gets back to us."
"I find MicroStrategy the most suited to the enterprise-wide BI platform, because of its scalability and stability."
"We've made a few enhancements to our Enterprise Manager system to allow self-reporting to grow. We see that as a very useful system. It's been incredibly beneficial in diagnosing production performance issues, diagnosing what reports are running slowly, where the SQL could be optimized, opportunities or metrics where we see long-time running performance. Enterprise Manager has been absolutely vital in giving us some of the insights about our system."
"I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday."
"In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"It has limited performance capabilities in terms of connecting to large transactional databases, but it is fine for simple and quick queries from Excel spreadsheets or one table. The premium level is going to be more applicable for the higher transaction-level databases."
"The initial setup is a little bit technical."
"The product’s on-premise reporting servers could support real-time data refreshing capabilities like its on-cloud version."
"The product could have better analytics capabilities."
"I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms, because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster."
"Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them."
"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."
"We had some problems with customer service and support."
"Our data warehouse is sort of static; negative load and that is it. It is not as real-time as we would like. We are working on building that out first to create more real-time, at which point we will work on some potential integrations with other applications, but I don't think we are there yet."
"Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience."
"It needs row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out."
"They need to improve the web."
"We did have issues with stability, and that was because we were co-located with another business unit, and we outgrew them on the unit. So we had to get to a separate physical instance."
"Enterprise Manager should be a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 155 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while MicroStrategy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Databricks, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE. See our MicroStrategy vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
