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 good part of it is that you can do whatever you want with it when it comes to building BI. In terms of languages, it supports Python, and it also natively supports R."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."
"It is easy to use. It has got a desktop where people can develop their own dashboards. Basically, we have figured out how to connect finance contracts and all programs for the government agency. So, they can see everything in a dashboard. So, it is very easy to use from a technical standpoint of view."
"In contrast to what we were using before I think that Power BI has given us more extensive results."
"Considering that it's Microsoft, it can be integrated with the Power Platform, which is also Microsoft-based, like SharePoint, Power apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, which is the most user-friendly."
"The most valuable features in Microsoft BI are the analysis using the feature drag and drop function. It's very easy to load and use different data sources."
"The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time. It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet."
"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."
"Speed for high level aggregation by using Intelligent Cubes."
"It is a great tool and has the best offerings for doing data analysis."
"Stability is great, especially with package deployments. It is very consistent and stable."
"Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature."
"The data governance leads people to trust the data that they have, and they know where to get it."
"Reports are very easy to create. It takes a very short amount of time to build a report, which is very useful."
"It has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements."
"The convenience of it. Having it on the mobile, so someone has it right there in their pocket most of the time."
"The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics."
"I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports."
"Some kind of expression wizard, where the user can build a complex expression without any knowledge of DAX, can be a good addition to the product."
"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."
"We have used other solutions and the reporting functionality should be user-friendly and have a drag and drop feature should be available, but Microsoft BI doesn't have these features. When you are creating reports and you can't change as a user. Every time you need one developer or one technical person to make the changes."
"Most clients have MacBooks. Therefore, they use Tableau as Power BI Desktop is not available for the MacBook right now."
"Areas for improvement would be the construction of reports and the dashboard budget."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document."
"There might be opportunities for reporting or data analysis, perhaps even in the realm of simulation."
"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."
"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."
"It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it."
"We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time."
"Getting our data to work with the tool is where we are having issues."
"Something I would be interested in is more visualizations, because right now we use SDK to create some. If there were more out-of-the-box options, we would be happy with that."
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 SAS Visual Analytics, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Tableau, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, IBM Cognos, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE. See our MicroStrategy vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
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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.
