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.
"Power BI stands out because it provides considerable flexibility in creating reports, dashboards, and various types of analytics to meet those dynamic requirements. It is lightweight and easy to use with good support."
"It's the analytic engine in terms of the interface on the Power BI environment, as opposed to pivot tables, and it's a mobile solution."
"The one feature most of our customers like is data visualization. When we were doing BI directly from SQL, most users found it challenging to create their own reports. Power BI has self-serve analytics that the end-users can do themselves. On most projects, people are primarily using data visualization and self-serve analytics."
"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."
"It is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow."
"The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on."
"The dashboard features are really valuable, you can connect to multiple data points."
"It is low-cost and easy to deploy. It is fully-featured."
"In the past, when we had so many legacy systems, with Cognos and others, it was took multiple steps to get what we wanted. Now, it's a seamless integration. We can connect directly, in the form of In-Memory Cubes or live-publish cubes, to the data warehouse, and blend in the data with big data. Not only relational databases, but we can also integrate other third-party files, and create a single-source software."
"Stability is great, especially with package deployments. It is very consistent and stable."
"The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards."
"The scalability is great. It was one of the selling points for us on MicroStrategy."
"We pretty much use the knowledge base. We feel that Microstrategy's community is a good forum to use."
"The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful."
"Getting more data to people more quickly. Providing more flexibility for how they use the data."
"The single stack solution will always be more profitable, scalable, and elastic for organizational needs."
"If I have to update data automatically, where I have to pin the gateway, it doesn't update. There is a scheduled refresh functionality so that it refreshes automatically, but I find it very hard to make it work."
"A lot of people work on Excel, so being able to export an Excel file as part of a subscription would be an improvement."
"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."
"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."
"We would like it if they added more Python libraries in the Power BI service. For Power BI service right now, you can use Python, but it is limited to a few libraries or a few packages from Python."
"I think that the product would benefit by increasing the range of visuals and graphics readily available, as opposed to using a third party included as part of the product."
"It's quite difficult to learn how to use Power BI."
"In the future, Microsoft BI can be better by increasing user-friendliness"
"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."
"MicroStrategy should improve migration automation. Additionally, I would like there to be better partnership support."
"The online community page of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"MicroStrategy is not cloud native today and some of their APIs are a little limiting."
"I think they're still lacking on customer service. I think historically, MicroStrategy's customer service was a lot better than it is today."
"The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern."
"The solution's licensing could be improved because its cost is heavy on the pockets."
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.