Looker vs MicroStrategy comparison

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2,207 views|1,755 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
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2,838 views|1,851 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker and MicroStrategy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Embedded BI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Looker vs. MicroStrategy Report (Updated: March 2024).
769,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great.""It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time.""We can centralize all our data models.""I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability.""With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.""It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product.""The product is easy to use.""The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."

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"​I have had a lot of projects where we had a lot of users, like thousands of users, and the data was in one report which could bring in six million records. MicroStrategy is doing a good job on scalability.""It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now.""​Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature.​""It's a stand-alone mobile development app that you don't even have to do business intelligence on. You can just use it to build apps.""Speed for high level aggregation by using Intelligent Cubes.""We prefer having the analytic capabilities in a single platform, like MicroStrategy provides, because it is easier. The customer gets used to one type of tool, then sticks with it.""The single stack solution will always be more profitable, scalable, and elastic for organizational needs.""The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave."

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Cons
"The visualization capability of the product is limited.""The integration with different databases must be improved.""The product does not have documented material.""Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms.""Integrations with other BI tools could be better.""It needs to be more user-friendly.""The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud.""Stability needs improvement."

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"It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy.""In the developer, there are things that you able to do in a document or a report that you are not able to do in the Dossier.""Our users tend to say the interface is a pain.""They should give proper industry-based tutorials so that one can learn it easily and implement it based on the requirements. They should give more MMP files so that we can import a whole project altogether and learn from that project.""​There is room for improvement on the graphs.""We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up.""We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better.""We have not invested nor are we planning to invest in MicroStrategy's mobile platform.​​"

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
  • "It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
  • "The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."
  • "It is cheap."
  • "I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
  • More Looker Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "They made a change in the licensing module some time ago and we can now use all the enterprise tools for free."
  • "The pricing for MicroStrategy is always on the higher side. They should seriously start thinking about their pricing and licensing strategy."
  • "While initial cost of MicroStrategy is still on the higher side, the long-term benefits brings down overall cost of ownership significantly as compared to other tools like Tableau/Cognos."
  • "The price was good. We have had great support along the way."
  • "We actually researched some of the other solutions. For options, price, and customer acceptance, this product has worked well for us.​"
  • "​They gave us a good deal.​"
  • "There have been actual direct bottomline impacts in terms of extra revenue created from the reporting solutions."
  • "They need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects. We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them."
  • More MicroStrategy Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts use to create and share insights. It is also the tool of choice for rapid prototyping of dashboards. Tableau is very flexible with its data import. Tableau's data blending capability is very intuitive. This capability is useful when you have data spread across several different sources that has not gone through ETL processes. This is a problem analysts deal with routinely. They are unable to wait for the data warehouse team to develop ETL processes to provide the physical models they need to build an analysis. The Tableau interface is Excel-like and has a low barrier to entry for analysts that are used to working in Excel. Building a dashboard by mashing up visualizations in a Tableau worksheet is extremely simple. Users are able to build good presentation-quality dashboards in a very short amount time. Tableau's annotations capabilities and its time and geographical intelligence are key differentiators. Tableau has overcome limitations in data sharing with the introduction of a Data Server in Tableau 7.0. The Data server allows Data sources and extracts to be shared securely and opens up interesting new possibilities. If your application can take advantage of the above… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
    Top Answer:I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it to… more »
    Top Answer:The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it… more »
    Top Answer:The stability of the product is good.
    Top Answer:MicroStrategy's licensing cost is higher than that of other tools in the market. My company uses the enterprise edition of the product. For beginners, there are trial accounts that are provided by the… more »
    Top Answer:For everything we do in our company, we consider MicroStrategy to be a workaround solution. For better customization in documents or dashboards, MicroStrategy can improve the features or settings… more »
    Ranking
    5th
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    2,207
    Comparisons
    1,755
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    634
    Rating
    7.7
    4th
    out of 31 in Embedded BI
    Views
    2,838
    Comparisons
    1,851
    Reviews
    12
    Average Words per Review
    568
    Rating
    7.5
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time. 

    With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations. 

    The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

    Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

    Product portfoilio:

    MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.

    Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.

    Sample Customers
    Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
    Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company25%
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Retailer8%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization33%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Retailer11%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Retailer10%
    Insurance Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise42%
    Large Enterprise32%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise71%
    Buyer's Guide
    Looker vs. MicroStrategy
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Looker vs. MicroStrategy and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    769,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while MicroStrategy is ranked 4th in Embedded BI with 155 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while MicroStrategy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". On the other hand, the top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and Alteryx, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and SAP Analytics Cloud. See our Looker vs. MicroStrategy report.

    See our list of best Embedded BI vendors.

    We monitor all Embedded BI 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.