MicroStrategy Reviews

It can be applied to a wide range of uses. It's a complete solution for all the BI needs of a company.

Mobility features have helped people who work supervising shops.

Visual Insight isn't as easy to use as the competitors.

I’ve used MicroStrategy for 15 years.

We occasionally had stability issues.

We did not have any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 1.5/5 because they hardly ever help you with problems and when they do it's very late.

We have always MicoStrategy.

Recently, the licensing method and pricing have been simplified. Now it is much easier to understand.

At that moment many of the current tools didn't yet exist.

No special advice.

We are using MicroStrategy in development and also for the web.

For our customers, Dossier is the latest for innovation and we like it a lot.

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 allows you to do more than the standard object.

We use a lot of data sources, and MicroStrategy allows us to use external data sources. This is very helpful. For example, we can connect to BigQuery, Oracle, and several other platforms.

The Dossier feature needs improvement. 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.

Some of the features that are in the developer should be moved into the web application.

There are some filtering capabilities on dynamic dates that are not easy to use in the Dossier.

There are features such as transformations that are harder to achieve than in the Data Studio. This is an area that needs some improvements.

I would like to have Hyper Intelligence that is free to use without a special license.

For mobiles, it should be easier to achieve without having to have a special license. Not everyone can afford to have a license for mobile and a separate license for the developer and the web.

Also, I would like to see something more in data mining and predictive analysis. In order to be able to build them, you need to have special skills. It would be easier to achieve, with some plugins, or some tutorials in place to help.

I have been working with this solution for thirteen years.

The tool is stable and scalable. We are testing each upgrade and even if some issues appear, hey are not show stoppers and our existing solutions are not afected.

We have an in-house team for deployment.

We have a license with packages, and there are additional costs for extra components.

I am a user and don't have all of the information regarding licenses and how they are acquired. I know this is a special contractual relationship between our managers and the team in the USA.

I am certified in MicroStrategy 9 and 10 for data analysis and as a report developer.

We are trying to connect MicroStrategy and Data Studio to the Google Cloud Platform. We prefer MicroStrategy and are trying to convince clients to switch.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Primary use case would be for mobile apps, exposing mobile data to people who need data at the right time and the right location, and MicroStrategy does that. 

It does so extremely well. They have one of the best mobile BI apps available. They've the got the whole power of the MicroStrategy ecosystem, and they just expose it through the app. 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. It's pretty cool.

In the old days - which is not long ago, about 10 years ago - before iPhones, you literally had to go back to your desk to run a report, and your report could take an hour to run. 

Now, you can run that same report, you can access it from Starbucks, or wherever, to your mobile device, and you've got access to information. The decision makers within your company have access to the information wherever they want it, whenever they want it.

Building apps is easy. You just drag in your data, and then you drag in all the elements that you want on your app. It's drag and drop design, and then you can customize your visuals. They make it all easy with plug and play widgets. That just makes it too easy. Don't tell my employers.

We use Writeback mainly for regular database transaction tables. It's just a feedback loop, back into the mobile dashboards. You can type into those and then writeback whatever you wrote in, back to a database. And then, when you refresh your dashboard, everybody can see your input refreshed, instantly. It's an instant feedback loop, we don't writeback to any source systems. It's just for MicroStrategy's circle of functionality, an "interloop."

Since I'm a "mobile-dashboardy" guy, I would like to see more capabilities on the mobile side to bring it on par with apps that you see in the App Store, like Uber or Facebook. They've got all the bells and whistles - well, maybe not Facebook. The interface you can design in MicroStrategy is great, but I feel it needs to be refreshed, add a bit more functionality. As a developer in 2018, at least I have features that we're seeing in other apps in the App Store. I feel like we're a few years behind with our features, but still pretty excellent features.

We haven't really had issues with stability. 

Well, in the old days, say a few years ago, upgrades only came out once every year and they were more stable. But MicroStrategy has moved to a quarterly release, so they've got a lot more new features in there, which means there's an opportunity for bugs to slip through. So, occasionally, the Mobile Server does crash, but it instantly recovers and users typically don't even notice it. 

If the disconnect happens when they're on a screen, at least their data is there, and because there are local device caches holding the data, there's a certain offline capability that is just built-in naturally, so you don't need a connection all the time. By the time the Mobile Server comes back, they didn't even notice. Typically, downtimes are very limited.

On our mobile solution you can deploy up to 100,000 users. In our case, we're up to about 10,000 active users, and MicroStrategy's server technology behind the scenes, the Intelligence Server and the Mobile Servers, are very robust and they can handle the workload, which is impressive.

I've learned by trial and error, but I've been working in it for about 10 years, so I've seen everything. We do use support occasionally in our company, for the bugs that we can't find a solution for.

They have different levels of support. The front-line support is okay resolving problems. I couldn't put a percentage on it, but once it escalates up to the next it usually gets resolved.

They've got a robust knowledge base that's open to the public, in the Community. You can literally search any problems there and somebody else has usually encountered it. You can fix a lot of problems yourself using the knowledge base, or talk to service. They usually fix the problems pretty fast.

Regarding upgrades, for version 10, which is the latest version, the upgrades are more robust. There aren't as many issues as in the previous version, version 9. There were definitely issues upgrading from 9 to 10 because it's a huge upgrade, but typically it's the same issues that you're going to encounter. 

Unfortunately, MicroStrategy is known for upgrade pain, so a lot of companies don't upgrade. You will encounter problems, and when you have major enterprises that can't run some reports for days or weeks on end, that's not acceptable. But that happens rarely. 

Version 10, I've noticed that in the upgrade process I have not encountered any problems, so there something has changed in the upgrade process for the better.

We are embedding multimedia content in our apps. Last week, I did a for-fun dashboard. It was all about Star Wars and Return of the Last Jedi. I had some active video in there that I started streaming from Vimeo. You can do that, you can embed streaming video from websites, or you can host the video files on your internal media servers. The video is clear, absolutely.

We are also distributing personalized alerts using native mobile push ads, for IOS and Android. It's pretty easy on MicroStrategy. There is a bit of configuration involved, so you definitely need to have a technical administrator help you get it set up, and your Apple developer to get all the certificates. There are a lot of moving parts, but once you get it set up, the alerts are great. You have to manage them, because you don't want an alert, the same alert, coming to the same person every 10 seconds because they will get annoyed and they will stop using your app. So, there's a fine line between too much information and too little.

We have configured our mobile apps to work offline to a certain extent, but most of ours do not work offline because there are some limitations involved with the offline modes, the performance issues, and sometimes performance is more important. There are tradeoffs. In some cases, we need offline data sets, but most of our clients use WiFi in the stores where they can launch their mobile app, and they're always connected. So they don't need offline. It depends on the use case. In our case, it doesn't really apply.

What I appreciate most in a vendor would be transparency, that they're being upfront with me. I would like to be able to purchase a piece of software that I know is going to cost me a lot of money, but I want them to be giving me their best price and not trying to give me a higher price and then I have to haggle with them to get a lower price. It would be nice if there was a sticker price that says, "This software costs this amount of money." But I think that's just indicative of all software vendors. A lot of people are in it to make money, commissions, so it's just the nature of the business. But I would like to see more transparency, more equality, on pricing. Some people get better deals than others, I think.

From my perspective as a mobile-focused, dashboard kind of guy, looking at how the business intelligence solution looks, I would rate it, capability-wise, an eight out of 10. It is dragging behind other tools on the self-service visualizations, like Tableau. I would rate Tableau as a 10. For the same visualizations, I would say MicroStrategy is an eight, maybe nine. They're still behind on the self-service visualizations, but on mobile visualizations I would give them a nine or even a ten. It depends on what part of the tool you use. Some parts are older and haven't had any "love" in the past, and some areas, like Dossiers, are getting all the love right now and they look modern. From my point of view, I would rate them pretty high, overall.

Think about how many people and how much money it's going to cost to implement a solution. It's not just buying the software, which is pricey. You have to think about all the servers - you need multiple servers. You need a lot of people, you need an administrator, an architect, you need developers, mobile developers. I was talking to one guy, he has a team of 40 people, and this is just building reports. So that's a hidden cost there, if you want to crank out a lot of work, you're going to have to have a lot of people. It's not just for a small company. It's just too much.

We obtain all the data from different data sources and put them together. I report to different subject areas like finance, operations, product, etc.

The product is performing well.

Reports are very easy to create. It takes a very short amount of time to build a report, which is very useful. It is very easy to access them from my desktop and web (everywhere). When someone logs in, they can simply see all the reports. It is easy to schedule them.

We are running Self-Service to our business teams now. It is good.

We prefer a many point solution right now due to different areas of the business, because they are asking for different things. Some functionality is easier to be built in different products. Therefore, I have found MicroStrategy to be probably doing 80% of everything, but there is 20% left that is easier with other tools with different types of visualizations slicing and dicing the data.

In 2018, we plan on using Dossier.

The most valuable features are the Visual Insights and the visualizations.

We are using the mobile analytics of MicroStrategy. It is in production.

It's just very small technical things. Sometimes you can do something on attributes in documents RSDs, but then you can't do the same thing in Visual Insights or Dossier. Just being able to do everything across everything. Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents. So, it is expected that you should be able to do everything everywhere. 

It is stable.

It is fine. Halfway there.

If you make it much bigger, some performance issues come up. On a smaller scale, it's performing well. For us, it is not that big, so it is good. However, we are not going to add more on it.

For technical support, it depends. Sometimes, they are very quick and very supportive. Sometimes, nothing comes back. Sometimes, I give them a 10 out of 10, and sometimes, I give them a two out of 10. The problems are mostly in L2 or L3.

I was not involved.

The initial setup was straightforward.

If you want an enterprise solution, definitely go with MicroStrategy. If you want something for a small business area, like your HR needs some reporting or your finance needs some reporting, go with a different tool.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Just price. First thing is price. For larger companies, maybe price is not a big issue, but for a company of our size, price is important. Being able to address all the issues or all the capabilities that we require, it is very important. The support, the training, and all these things that come with the product, that is also important. 

Currently, we are using MicroStrategy to provide Self-Service to clients. We have different departments in our company, like finance, accounting, and so on. We provided different projects for them and they are loving the product. We have approximately 200 users, and they have different roles from user to analyst to power users.

It improved a lot because coming from using Excel files, then using Oracle OBIEE, there is more flexibility now. The product is more scalable. We can support multiple platforms and different users. It is really good.

In 2018, we will be looking at Dossier and it collaboration aspect, which will be good for us. 

The future plan is to also introduce mobile, but right now we are in the infancy stage. We are trying to introduce the ad hoc reporting, and once we get in-depth in it and we make it sticky enough, then we will move to mobile.

• A single version of the truth.
• Having the analytics capabilities on a single platform.
• The usability for users to be able to drag and drop, then create their own reports.

• There is room for improvement on the graphs. 
• They need to improve the web. 
• I know we are not competing against Tableau, but MicroStrategy needs to step up its game on the GUI side.

I have been using MicroStrategy for a long time, so I know how stable it is. It depends on how you structure it and how you architecture it. Once you are done with the basics, it is pretty stable

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 has gotten better. Before you had to go through Level 2, then Level 3 of support to get your questions answered. Now, even Level 1 could answer your intermediate questions, though there is still room for improvement.

I did not do the initial setup at this company, but at my previous company where I did installation, upgrades, and configurations.

The initial setup is straightforward for me, but it could vary from person to person. It is pretty straightforward, but you have to know the key words and so on, like project source. There is definitely a learning curve, but once you get to know it, everything is straightforward.

Give the product a try.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Flexibility
• Performance
• Scalability. 

The most valuable thing is not the product. It's having a product for BI. We first made a lot of dashboards. They are very useful for management and automatic reports with summarized data.

The dashboards can be exported to MHT. This allow us send them by email, or publish in our intranet and sync in mobile devices so they can use it off line.

We have centralized a lot of reports. We all are using the same data. We've discussed a lot about the significance of some terms.

The administration of automatic email reports is not very good. It has to be improved in a more easily and effective way, with the same license.
I would like to see data mining integrated.

I have used MicroStrategy for five years.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

We have had no technical issues.

We used Oracle Discoverer but it was very poor.

We have a very smooth setup. This was because we began with a small project that includes installation.

Setup is not complex.

We evaluated an Oracle BI product, I think it was former PeopleSoft, but we choose MicroStrategy because .mht files cab be sent by email and you can use it without internet access.

The main effort is making the DW and the models. The rest is not so difficult, but you have to implement a corporative strategy to stop using any other reporting system.

Dashboard development.

Presents dashboards with more enhanced visualizations compared to other tools.

Business User friendly - which has been enhanced in Version 10.

4 years

Yes, the 2 million row limit.

No

Straightforward and simple, but takes long to install.