MicroStrategy Reviews

Mobile dashboards give people the data they need at a glance and on the go.

EVPs are able to run their entire business from an iPad; they can answer questions, see issues, etc. at their fingertips.

- Purchasing process: MicroStrategy is a very litigious organization. When we want to enter certain agreements, it's not uncommon for the request to go back and forth within legal for weeks. Some of this is our organization as well, though.
- Support: The support line used to be top notch, but now it seems as though the people manning that line are not very knowledgeable and can very rarely actually answer the question or solve the problem.

I have used it for 15 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

We previously used a different solution. We switched because MicroStrategy was more robust.

It is a rather complex setup, with many moving pieces and very configurable, so by default you must figure out how you want to configure it.

Be patient; get a good understanding of what you need.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Oracle OBIEE and SAP BO.

Hire a professional to help implement the program not just the installation.

Centralized

Object oriented

Meta Data

All business data available to analyse in acceptable time and form with no extra efforts.

Visualisation will improved in the next version.

15 Years

No

No

Good

Good enough

MS OLAP and SAP BW.

High

OBIEE, MS OLAP, Cognos, Tableau, QlikView

We primarily use the solution with enterprise-level financial companies, as well as retail and telecom organizations. 

There are lots of features that provide very robust functionalities.

The solution is ideal for enterprise-level companies or corporations. 

The stability is very good.

The solution has very good reporting tools. The reporting on the solution is excellent.

The solution offers some very powerful AI features.

We've found the scalability to be very good. However, it depends on the environment. In general, it could be much better.

We've been dealing with the solution for 25 years. It's been more than two decades. It's been a very long time.

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't seem to crash or freeze. Its performance is good overall. It's a reliable product.

The scalability capabilities depend on the customer's environment. It depends on the infrastructure.

There are both premium and standard options. MicroStrategy works on the customer's infrastructure. This is a very different approach than, for example, Power BI.

There could be better scaling tools put into place. 

We have more than 2,000 users on the solution currently. There are potentially a lot of users. In Turkey, all of the financial companies or retail companies, and other sizeable companies in the country use MicroStrategy.

Technically, we don't need Microstrategy support. We typically handle troubleshooting ourselves.

That said, on the production side, we're happy to coordinate with support, however, we've rarely faced any issues that would require assistance. 

We also sell Microsoft BI. Commonly, enterprise-level or corporate-level companies use the MicroStrategy, however, SMB companies prefer Power BI.

MicroStrategy's installation takes time. However, it doesn't take weeks, for example. It only really takes a couple of days. In contrast, however, with Power BI there is no installation process at all. You just buy a license. After that, your Power BI is open.

I'm not sure of the actual cost of the solution. Licensing is not handled by my department. I can't speak to if it is reasonably priced or more on the expensive side. 

We are the company that handles approximately 95% of MicroStrategy implementation in Turkey. We are a distributor and a reseller.

I highly recommend MicroStrategy for enterprise-level companies. It brings some discipline to the industries for customers. Power BI, of course, is an option, however, part of it is like Excel or like a very free low-cost tool. 

A MicroStrategy implementer must synchronize with the customer and the application. You need to play with the features a bit and customize them to your needs. You cannot just list reports. You have to take some time to put some structure into the solution so that it works how you need it to.  

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. There are some excellent features on offer, which is why I rated it so highly.

It can be used for various things. We are currently using it for executive dashboarding, critical success factors, and business monitoring. We have its latest version.

It is easy to use and visually very appealing. One thing that sets it apart is that it has got a great ETL tool. As compared to some of the other solutions, it is much easier to process data from other applications in MicroStrategy. That's why we prefer using it.

Its price should be lower. In terms of features, what we have is quite encompassing right now.

I have been using this solution for about four or five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. Currently, we have five users of this solution in our organization. There are about two or three people who are responsible not only for maintenance but also for the enhancement of the reports and other things.

Their technical support is very nice.

We have used other products.

It is expensive. We would like to extend it to many users, but we are currently restricting that because the cost is a constraint. If we are given a chance, we would love to expand it.

I would absolutely recommend this solution. We plan to keep using it.

I would rate MicroStrategy an eight out of ten.

When we were using it before, it was mainly for some types of reporting, primarily sales reporting. We also use it for external reporting and that went out to our customers to allow our member hospitals to view their own purchasing data, for example, who they're buying from, what vendors, what kind of pricing they're getting. Mostly its reports on things of that nature. It was and is used for both internal reporting and external member facing reporting.

We moved to Tableau and we're still using it a little bit for some of our solutions.

The security is quite robust. It is more of a true enterprise solution. That made it much easier to deploy out at the time to our members. 

The common metadata, the library that MicroStrategy has made, makes it much easier to reuse components and not have to recreate them for every dashboard. That was something we really liked and still do.

The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution.

Overall, we found the solution to be quite stable.

At the time we moved away from relying on it, the solution was really lagging as far as visualizations and ease of dashboard creation. It took much more of a MicroStrategy expert to design dashboards. It wasn't really something users could do on their own. The self-service component was really lacking.

The cost is pretty high. It was a little pricier than Tableau, for example.

The learning curve is quite steep. A company should consider a third-party service to help with implementation.

We've been using the solution for 20 years or so. It's been a very long time. We have a lot of experience with it.

Overall, we were really happy with it. As far as an enterprise solution goes, it was very stable. It was very mature and had many robust features, as far as building applications and alerting, et cetera. The thresholding just had a very robust feature set, which is what we liked about it.

We didn't really deal with bugs and glitches. It didn't crash and freeze. It was very reliable for many years.

The solution is well suited to enterprise-level companies. 

We are currently using Tableau. It's less expensive.

The initial setup was done a very long time ago. We had a third-party help us when we first implemented it back in the 90's. 

Since then, we have managed it ourselves. 

We did hire a third-party to assist us in the implementation process when we first set the solution up.

We are just a customer and end-user.

We are using the 2019 version of the solution.

I used to run a consulting company and we would consult on this solution. I would always recommend to our customers that they get a third-party to help them implement it initially due to the fact that the learning curve to implement MicroStrategy is much steeper than something like a Tableau.

Since we moved away from MicroStrategy, they've really gained traction on their visualizations and it's much more similar to a Tableau design now, as far as building visualizations. That was the only thing really lacking for us. It's good that they've moved in this direction.

Technically, we are still using the solution, just at a reduced scale.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use MicroStrategy for our supply chain and merchandising, because we are retail.

Performance has been pretty good so far.

Because we are in retail, we do a lot of analytics. The way that we designed the graph is pretty cool for our analysis on a daily basis, so that we can define our forecast.

Definitely the dashboards and the VI, because they're pretty cool for our customers.

Our business users have access to self-service.

And looking at 2018, the feature we plan on using the most is Dossiers.

Right now, MicroStrategy is on AWS by itself. Since we are retail - and AWS is Amazon, which is our competitor - if they would move onto different cloud environments, that would be awesome.

Stability is pretty good. We have been using it for four years. We might have had some downtime, but it's pretty easy to bring it up.

It really scales. The stability and scalability are really cool. That's the beauty of MicroStrategy. It competes really well with Tableau, but data-wise, MicroStrategy beats all odds.

We have used tech support many times. Sometimes they're knowledgeable. I would say that there is a lot room for them to improve. The time that I spend with the technical support, if I'd spent the same amount of time doing my own research on the knowledge base side, I could get pretty much the same thing. 

Some of the technical support guys are really awesome, but others...

It was pretty straightforward.

We prefer having the analytics capability in a single platform, versus in a many-points solution, because our user base is pretty small. I don't know if we even offer multiple platforms. I'm not sure if we have tried that or not.

We have already invested in MicroStrategy's mobile platform and it's pretty good.

When looking at vendors to work with, we look not so much at name brand but at technical support and application features.

I would give it an eight out of 10. There's a lot of room for improvement, with all the other BI tools in the market.

Go for it. If you are a retail company, I would say go for it, do a PoC, it should be fine. Because I've been working with MicroStrategy for the last 12 years, I know what it is capable of.

We have installed MicroStrategy and implemented a couple sample reports just to prove we can. However, we do not have all our current reports from Tableau replicated in a MicroStrategy environment, and we are headed that direction. 

We are planning on rolling out Self-Service and investing in mobile analytics.

In the immediate future as in the next month, because our other license expires in March, we want to hurry up and just get all of our reporting replaced and have them all in MicroStrategy, then we will move forward from there. 

We are still on the beginning stages, however having the intelligence server sit in the middle is huge for us. It is going to save us a lot of time, make our work a lot simpler, make it easier for deployment, and getting the reports in the hands of our users sooner. 

It was easy to install and implement a report with it.

It is too early to tell. We have some ideas regarding what we can do, because we have been using a different product all along. We will see as time passes as to what we could do before that we have trouble with MicroStrategy, but I do not think it will be a problem. 

No issues.

No issues.

During installation I had some trouble, I created actually a couple tickets with the support department and Micro Strategy helped us straighten those out. They were very knowledgeable.

We are currently using Tableau. We recently signed a contract with MicroStrategy. We are going to move all our reports from Tableau to MicroStrategy. We are not going to connect Tableau to MicroStrategy, which we could. We are just going to let our Tableau license expire in March, then we are just going to go MicroStrategy all the way. 

We do not want to pay Tableau and pay MicroStrategy. It is a business decision. We are going to do one, not both. 

Initial setup was straightforward.

They gave us a good deal. They convinced one of our executives that we are getting a deal, so they signed. 

We want to do what makes sense for our business. We are not married to one way of doing it. We will listen to our business people and we will do whatever makes sense depending on the situation. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: We want a solution that we can implement in a short amount of time. We don't want to go back and forth in a month; we want it to work right now. Also, we want to be able to have a vendor who we can reach, and they respond when we submit a ticket. They need to respond in a short amount of time. Even though, they are busy answering requests from other people our requests are important to us.

We are using it for operations analysis and sales data analysis.

We are still getting it setup, so it is hard to say how it is going to perform. We are not really live yet. We are in the setup and test phase.

We do plan on rolling out the Self-Service to our business teams.

The dashboarding is probably the best feature for us. It is something that we have not had in the past.

We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers.

In 2018, we will probably be using the documents and dashboards.

MicroStrategy seems to be very easy to use; user-friendly. Getting our data to work with it is where we are having issues.

We have not really scaled much.

I have not used technical support yet.

I was more on the data side getting it ready, not the administration of the product. The complexity is with our data, not really MicroStrategy.

Probably Tableau and some others, but I was not really involved in the decision process.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: They need to fit what we are trying to accomplish.