We compared Tableau and MicroStrategy across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Based on the user feedback summaries, Tableau is preferred over MicroStrategy due to its superior data visualization capabilities, user-friendly interface, and strong customer service and support. Users highly value Tableau's ease of use, powerful data analysis capabilities, and ability to handle large datasets. They also appreciate Tableau's prompt and efficient support team. Additionally, the favorable pricing and positive return on investment from Tableau make it a preferred choice. On the other hand, MicroStrategy could benefit from improvements in areas such as scalability, user interface design, collaboration features, and expanded functionality.
Initial Setup: When comparing user reviews, it is evident that there are differences between Tableau and MicroStrategy in terms of the duration required for deployment, setup, and implementation phases. Some Tableau users spent separate timeframes on deployment and setup, while in MicroStrategy, these terms likely refer to the same period.
Features: Tableau is praised for its ease of use, interactive dashboards, and storytelling functionality. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy stands out for its intuitive interface, powerful visualization tools, and seamless integration with other systems.
Room For Improvement: Tableau's room for improvement lies in enhancing data visualization capabilities and offering more advanced data analysis features. Users also request improvements in customization options and menu navigation, as well as better support and documentation for beginners. On the other hand, MicroStrategy could benefit from enhancements in scalability and performance, especially with larger datasets. Users also suggest improving the user interface for a more intuitive and user-friendly design, and expanding collaboration features and data visualization options.
Pricing and ROI: Comparing the setup costs, Tableau has reasonable and efficient implementation process. MicroStrategy also offers reasonable setup costs with flexible licensing arrangements according to user experiences. In comparing the ROI between Tableau and MicroStrategy, Tableau users reported significant impact in terms of return on investment. They praised its valuable insights, data visualizations, and user-friendly interface. MicroStrategy users also found the ROI to be positive and satisfactory, with improved data analysis and decision-making capabilities.
Customer Service: Tableau's customer service is highly praised for its exceptional assistance, promptness, expertise in troubleshooting, and effectiveness in providing solutions. MicroStrategy's customer service is commended for efficient assistance, prompt response, knowledgeable staff, and proactive issue resolution. Customers highly regard both companies' customer service.
The summary above is based on interviews we conducted recently with Tableau and MicroStrategy users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The data governance leads people to trust the data that they have, and they know where to get it."
"It's user-friendly, also the MTDI cube is a very good approach, as it helps you to use the pre-format instead of using the standard objects from the schema of MicroStrategy."
"It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there."
"We are embedding multimedia content in our apps... You can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely."
"MicroStrategy has powerful data security features, which are crucial these days. For example, when users view data in MicroStrategy, they're only allowed to see a portion based on the permissions. When we evaluated other solutions like Power BI or Tableau, we found the security is very poor. They can't help us secure access to the data."
"I have never had any problems with the stability."
"We leverage it, not only for reporting but for analytics and also for geospatial reporting."
"The most valuable features are the Visual Insights and the visualizations."
"It's a very good, flexible product, and it's easy to learn."
"Data Interpreter: Which can identify issues or potential errors with your imported data."
"The feature that is currently most valuable is the import feature where I can link to an Excel data source. I'm not using it with any other data source, such as SQL Server. I directly link it to an Excel sheet, and if I change anything in that Excel sheet, the changed data immediately gets reflected in the virtualization. This is something that is very convenient for me as of now."
"Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good. It is a very good tool, and it basically brings life into data with good design. We have been creating a lot of interactive visualizations and dashboards. It has a public version. There are public communities from where you can get a lot of examples for practice."
"Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability."
"I have found many of the self-service features valuable."
"I like Tableau's heat maps and the storyboard. You can create data stories and tons of visuals with it, and it goes together really well. Tableau lets you manipulate the data in various ways."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"Preparation, data loading and data management application is challenging with MicroStrategy. It lacks cube-based analytics as it is outdated, meaning there is no memory or fast processing analytics or MMA deployment."
"Another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops."
"The pricing could be lower because it is costly."
"I don't think that they will, but I'd like to see parallel processing, scalable parallel processing."
"It would be good if it had greater analytics so we could build these visualizations by ourselves with scripts."
"Getting our data to work with the tool is where we are having issues."
"Training would be an area that they could improve upon."
"I would try to make it a little more basic, user-friendly. In terms of the UX, it's a bit sluggish there."
"Users would like to be able to export an Excel file when they see a table or something like that. That's not an out-of-the-box feature for Tableau."
"Navigating through activities like cleansing, reshaping, and wrangling extensive or complicated datasets could prove challenging within the Tableau environment."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"Tableau's automatic insight could be improved. It has some predefined capabilities to understand the data, but I think they need more. Customers need more insight automatically from data—they don't want to discover them, they want to get the forecast automatically. The data preparation should also be improved because it's not easy. Tableau tries to focus on the business side, but the backend side has not improved much. They also have an ETS solution, but it's limited."
"We have products like Tableau, Power BI, Cognos, and QlikView in the data visualization segment. Compared to those, Tableau is quite costly."
"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control. If there was some sort of version control support offered particularly for workbooks, that would help big time."
"If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes."
"The data preparation could integrate better with Tableau."
MicroStrategy is ranked 4th in Embedded BI with 155 reviews while Tableau is ranked 1st in Embedded BI with 291 reviews. MicroStrategy is rated 8.2, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Looker. See our MicroStrategy vs. Tableau report.
See our list of best Embedded BI vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
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