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.
"It is useful for bringing visualization to data. It calculates counts, ratios, etc."
"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with."
"It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on."
"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"Power BI has strong support from Microsoft. If you need help, they answer promptly. There are also several discussion groups where you can get information, like the product roadmap and any new things coming up."
"The user interface is easy to work with."
"I like that they're trying to incorporate Developer into Workstation and Desktop into Workstation, so you get the all-in-one encompassing, highly technical Developer Workstation where you can do the VI, you can do the Dossier."
"The data governance leads people to trust the data that they have, and they know where to get it."
"The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave."
"Workstation and Desktop on the client side will speed up some development activities."
"The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports."
"The whole repository side of things is beneficial because you develop it once, and you can use it anywhere, in the Enterprise grade."
"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."
"MicroStrategy has what they call the Semantic Graph — an enterprise-grade semantic graph — and I think the technology is fantastic."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
"It would be better if they had some video tutorials. Most people from an Excel background may struggle with measures in Microsoft BI."
"I cannot comment on the stability as we haven't yet used it for a big project."
"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."
"SSMS & SSRS."
"I would like it to be a little bit more secure when I'm using the design feature on my desktop. For example, to have the ability to set up security passwords for opening the file. Currently, they don't have that. Tableau, for example, has a visual way of doing data processing steps, whereas the Power BI system still has some code, although it is very low code. It would be great to have the kind of view that Tableau has."
"Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources."
"The solution could improve the extraction and transformation of data. For example, you transform the data and then send it to Microsoft BI without having to use your own API. We are only providing the API to Power BI, and then Power BI is doing the job."
"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."
"Needs more visualizations out-of-the-box."
"The product could be improved by adding additional visualization."
"Needs tighter mapping integration."
"When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry."
"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."
"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."
"They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services."
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.