We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI, MicroStrategy, and Pentaho Business Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."Technical support is quite responsive."
"I like the downloadable visualizations a lot. I think that they give the user a very nice starting point in creating awesome dashboards, with the right way to tell their data story."
"It is a little easier at buildings charts and graphs than Tableau."
"It is a pretty straightforward and flexible solution for data integration and modeling. It is a low-code solution. When you are doing data integration, you can use the GUI, which is very simple and straightforward. You can also do very intricate custom queries and model it at different levels. It is very easy to use and scalable."
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"It's quite flexible, and it's easy to create reports using this system. It is very graphic and very user friendly."
"Microsoft BI is very easy to set up and use."
"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."
"We have been using it mostly for grid reports and its exporting features."
"I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things."
"The technical support of MicroStrategy can be helpful through implementation."
"Technical support is knowledgeable. The right person gets back to us whenever we email them."
"The subscription model is excellent. About half of our reporting comes out of the subscription, and from there, the ease of use in dragging and dropping reporting objects."
"It has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements."
"Dossiers are going to change the name of the game for us. We want to be able to have the executive committee go into a meeting and tell a story. We want them to tell us a story, not us."
"The most valuable features of MicroStrategy are user-friendliness and integration with the different data warehouse systems."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"In Microsoft Excel, you are able to have tabs. However, in Microsoft BI you do not have this flexibility."
"There is no specific area that I have a problem with. It's just that, with whatever feature you come across, every visual has its own formatting and behavior. What you get in one visual for a feature, you don't seem to get in another."
"I would like to be able to use more predicting data science features without having to use R."
"Real-time refreshing for SAP BW would be nice. We know its on the radar for the development team at MS. "
"When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing. Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue. It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language."
"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."
"Needs single sign-on."
"It should be easier to use when there are multiple system sources."
"The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space."
"MicroStrategy needs to do some more development to make the platform easier to use. It's a complicated platform that requires a lot of skill to effectively utilize. So they could work on reducing the complexity to make it more accessible for a broader community of people."
"Needs tighter mapping integration."
"I would like to see the enterprise version available in a demo or as a trial version."
"The solution's licensing could be improved because its cost is heavy on the pockets."
"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."
"We have not invested nor are we planning to invest in MicroStrategy's mobile platform."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"The repository should be improved."
"Logging capability is needed."
"Version control would be a good addition."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."