MicroStrategy vs Yellowfin comparison

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MicroStrategy Logo
7,327 views|4,856 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Yellowfin Logo
287 views|222 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Feb 5, 2024

We compared MicroStrategy and Yellowfin across several parameters based on our user's reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

Both MicroStrategy and Yellowfin have their strengths and areas for improvement, as highlighted by user reviews. The initial setup experiences vary in terms of timeframes for deployment and setup. MicroStrategy excels in its intuitive interface and robust data visualization, while Yellowfin is distinguished by its advanced analytics tools and strong data integration capabilities. Users of both platforms report reasonable pricing with positive ROI. Furthermore, their customer service is praised for its responsiveness and helpfulness.

Initial Setup: The reviews for MicroStrategy indicate varying timeframes for establishing a new tech solution, with some users spending three months on deployment and an additional week on setup. Other users required a week for both deployment and setup. In comparison, the reviews for Yellowfin also mention different timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation phases. 

Valuable Features: MicroStrategy is praised for its intuitive interface, seamless integration, and powerful data visualization. In contrast, Yellowfin stands out for its advanced analytics tools, robust security measures, and strong integration capabilities with various data sources.

Room For Improvement: MicroStrategy could benefit from improvements in scalability, performance, user interface, collaboration features, and data visualization. Yellowfin, on the other hand, needs enhancements in interface design, data visualization capabilities, speed, efficiency, and compatibility with different data sources.

Pricing and ROI: MicroStrategy offers reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing arrangements, according to user experiences. Yellowfin provides a straightforward and hassle-free setup process with competitive pricing. Users find the cost reasonable for the features and capabilities offered and appreciate the flexibility in licensing options. The ROI from MicroStrategy is reported to be positive, offering valuable insights, improved data analysis, and enhanced decision-making capabilities. Yellowfin has also shown positive results in terms of ROI.

Customer Service: MicroStrategy's customer service is commended for efficient assistance, prompt response, and helpful guidance. Users find the support team reliable, knowledgeable, and attentive. Yellowfin's support is highly praised for responsiveness and helpfulness, with users feeling well-supported throughout their interactions.

To learn more, read our detailed BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Report (Updated: April 2024).
768,578 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
"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.""Having the analytics capabilities on a single platform.""Cube performance and easy integration with third-party tools/products, are valuable features.""It is scalable and integration-friendly.""​Technical support is knowledgeable. The right person gets back to us whenever we email them.""It was easy to install and implement a report with it.""The implementation was fairly straightforward.""The convenience of it. Having it on the mobile, so someone has it right there in their pocket most of the time."

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"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information.""It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis.""It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."

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Cons
"Scalability is something which will need to be improved when it goes to a bigger audience.""The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation.""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.""​There are a lot of offerings, and we are not fully using everything to its advantage.""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.""One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs.""Training would be an area that they could improve upon.""We would really like to see MicroStrategy have some support teams based more in Europe, because for now it seems that there is one person for the whole CE region. That is not exactly what we would like to see. We do know that MicroStrategy supports most places, either in the US or India, but those are different time zones, people, and cultures."

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"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."

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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: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 »
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    Comparisons
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    Average Words per Review
    568
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    7.5
    Views
    287
    Comparisons
    222
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    Overview

    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.

    Yellowfin offers a business intelligence (BI) platform that allows users to interact with big data in a variety of ways. Yellowfin works to provide big data access to companies of all sizes, from small business to billion-dollar enterprises. It is designed for providing data quickly and allowing users to filter for specific results, maximizing gain from big data. Yellowfin has a variety of dashboards so the user can filter, drill to detail, and have data analysis in the same browser. The data can also be easily shared with others via email, wiki embed, and reports. There is a mobile app as well, which works automatically with the desktop dashboards to allow users to access their data on the go, and alerts can be set up to notify a user via email or push to a mobile device if the data is indicating a critical event taking place. Yellowfin also can map data to locations, providing not only the what of data, but also the where. Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust provides its community in England with mental health and community care services. Using Yellowfin's mobile business intelligence capabilities to deliver reporting and analytics to approximately 6000 clinicians, Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust was able to greatly improve the quality of its patient care. Yellowfin allowed the Trust to access and share independent data from mobile devices as well as create a Balanced Scoreboard to quickly gather and report information on the company's performance to its executives, management, and directors.
    Sample Customers
    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.
    NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm15%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Retailer11%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm17%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Retailer9%
    Insurance Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company27%
    Government11%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Insurance Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise45%
    Buyer's Guide
    BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: April 2024.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 155 reviews while Yellowfin is ranked 36th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. MicroStrategy is rated 8.2, while Yellowfin is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Yellowfin writes "Very scalable design and easy to implement. It can reside alongside more complex enterprise systems". MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Qlik Sense, whereas Yellowfin is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Apache Superset, 9 Spokes, Tableau and SAP Crystal Reports.

    See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors and best Embedded BI 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.