MicroStrategy Reviews

• Mobile
• Data marts
• Cubes
• Visual Insights (VI)
• SQL engine
• MicroStrategy Office

Perfect balance between self-service and governed BI.

While VI gives self-serve agility, report wizard brings governance specifying limits on MicroStrategy and database end.

Development tools (developer and architect) need improvement.

Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking.

More than 10 years.

While deployment is easier, the upgrade is painful process.

Developer, iServer, Webserver all are very stable.

Some versions have memory leakage or cube index issues, but overall very stable software.

No, scalability is strength of MicroStrategy.

Very average customer service.

Sales is very responsive, but technical support is below average.

Below average.

Used Tableau, Cognos, SSIS, BO, and Pentaho.

Moved to MicroStrategy for a scalable and mobile solution.

Straightforward.

In-house.

Hard to calculate but offering a single BI platform brings down maintenance and time to market time.

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.

Yes, Looker BI.

The real difficulty is finding a correct development resource for MicroStrategy as it has a steep learning curve and is unlike other tools on the market.

The OLAP environment is valuable. The user can find all the data in a single place and through the web, without needing to install anything on their machines and, of course, once you have created the necessary metadata. That is not as easy in other platforms, such as Microsoft.

It gives people access to data in a single place (portal).

I believe they should move to the web completely and leave the desktop behind. Features available one time through one and another time through the other complicates things too much.

I have used it for three years.

We have had no stability issues.

We have had some scalability issues, but they have not been a big problem.

Technical support is poor. You have to read their manuals and that's pretty much everything you have.

The company I was working for chose that course of action. I'd rather we did a proof of concept with several vendors instead of choosing MicroStrategy up front.

The initial setup was complex, really complex! Lots of configurations and installations.

It's expensive. I believe there are others that can provide most of the features for a better price.

No other options were evaluated. My boss at the time didn't want to spend time with evaluations, unfortunately.

Compare, and if you're going to spend a lot of money anyhow, there are better options, surely!

The aesthetic capabilities of the dashboarding functionality are probably the most impressive. It enables designing really great looking widgets that I have not seen in other offerings.

A single management dashboard is visible on the big screens of all the company chiefs. This enables them to easily refer to it during meetings. They are able to drill down on specifics. It provides a view of the current position of the companies KPIs, and provides the main source of ‘true data’.

Licensing costs are extremely high and prohibitive for smaller to medium size businesses. This makes it the enterprise-wide reporting tool for larger corporations.

I have been using MicroStrategy for seven years.

I did not have any issues with stability.

I did not have any issues with scalability.

In South Africa, the level of support is very limited to Johannesburg. Very few local partners exist that support the application, compared to other tools in the market. I would, therefore, rate the level of technical support specifically in South Africa as mediocre.

Previously, the company used SAP Business Objects. I made the decision to switch over to MicroStrategy because Business Objects was acquired by SAP at the time. Most ongoing development on BusinessObjects became SAP-focused. This didn’t help us because we are an Oracle-centered organization. MicroStrategy seemed to be the best fit due to its being major database agnostic.

The setup was straightforward and relatively simple.

It’s very expensive. If the pretty picture isn’t one of your core requirements, then most other tools would fit the job.

We evaluated BusinessObjects, Cognos and QlikView.

It is essential to have resources available in the organization for harnessing the true potential of the tool.

The OLAP functionality of this product is best in class. The cubes created in MSTR can utilize all cores of the server and thus can be configured to use MPP architecture.

Another feature to highlight here is the latest Big Data Engine; MSTR's BDE is a Yarn based application that embeds right on top of Hadoop FS providing direct access to files in FS without need of any other language - Pig/Impala/Hive. I believe this is the closest a BI tool can embed on top of Hadoop FS.

The last one (not a feature though) which I would like to mention is the SQL that MSTR engine creates to retrieve data from warehouse. The multi-pass SQL is a very effective tool that provides lot of VLDB settings to tweak the SQL in regards to database, load and multiple other factors.

We were able to automate multiple repetitive tasks in the BI environment using administrative tools provided with this product. This helped the team focus their energies on critical work tasks.

Version control is still a major concern in MicroStrategy. I am aware that MSTR is working on it as an enhancement.

License cost is also on the heavier side. Perhaps the desktop version that launched recently, might help ease pressure on budget.

I have been using it for 7 years.

There are no issues with the stability of the product. It works well even with huge datasets and under heavy workloads.

Scalability is not an issue. Administrators can make use of clustering feature to balance out loads on MSTR I-Server. MSTR can scale vertically as well as horizontally.

Technical support has improved a lot in terms of response time as well as technical know-how. The trend was observed with the release of major version 10.x.

I have used some other solutions simultaneously and also at previous work places but I have never switched from one tool to another.

The initial setup is quite vast. Users need to install & configure a lot of components in the MicroStrategy toolkit. Starting from version 10.x, enterprise manager console is embedded in the operations manager console which requires additional configuration.

License cost is quite pricey with loads of add-on functionalities and tools. Organizations possessing an enterprise-wide vision should be the right customers for this tool.

The new addition - MicroStrategy desktop can be used as a standalone application and can help ease pricing pressure.

I did an assessment of Microsoft and MicroStrategy but I realized that both fall into quite different leagues. Microsoft is an ideal fit for low to mid-level companies while MicroStrategy is perfect for huge enterprises. The assessment is a part of market study and will be used for future prospect engagements to position MicroStrategy.

MicroStrategy requires a heavy dose of training and experience to master it. Prepare yourself with an experienced team before jumping into any project.

The best thing I saw was the excellent mobile integration. The interface is very clean and beautiful. The configuration of devices is extremely fast, you just need to click the link that is sent to you with all the configuration.

Another great feature of MicroStrategy is the SDK, with which you can introduce new charts and customize the whole web environment. You can customize almost everything in MicroStrategy. Finally, the MicroStrategy Community is very active, you can have answers faster than the support sometimes.

We provided dynamic reports, using data from a large database. The ability to use in-memory calculations in association with the calculations performed in the queries, made possible to run heavy queries faster, because the the heaviest calculations were performed by the analytical engine. So the query passed less time at the RDBMS.

In another situation, we were supposed to configure MicroStrategy Mobile on many devices. To do this, we made a list of the users, told them to download and install the app, and then we sent them the link to configure the application. In a few minutes, almost every device was configured and running.

The main thing that the company must improve is the support for their clients.

In Brazil I have seen many issues not being resolved for a long time, which makes the clients become impacient and disappointed.

I´ve been working with different versions of MicroStrategy since 2011, for different customers such as government agencies, banks and insurance companies.

A common issue during deployment in Windows was that, the registries were not being well configured, then the developer (Desktop) tool stopped running. To fix this issue you need to reinstall the tool.

There are also problems after installing MicroStrategy Web at IIS, and you need to go to the registries and change a specific path to the JNI Bridge.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered, and when we needed to upgrade a machine, we just had to change the memory configuration to use the new memory that was available.

In some cases MicroStrategy took too long to respond the opened cases, what made the clients very upset and disappointed.

I believe the customer service needs to improve. It can be better.

The manuals of the tool are very complete, if you follow that, you are not going to have many problems.

MicroStrategy need to create cheaper solutions, as nowadays it's too expensive, and sometimes you pay for something that you are not going to really use.

v10 of MicroStrategy is helping a lot of users by giving them the possibility to add new charts using JavaScript libraries like D3, in a very simple way using Visual Insight.

HTML5 is supported everywhere, so using it will be a game changer.

You must practice! The amount of configurations and possibilities are huge, so, go through the manuals, go through the online courses, participate in the community. There are a lot of things to learn.

Web Dashboards, Mobile, Transaction Services, and Visual Insights.

I am a consultant so my list is big. Therefore, I will pick the most recent one which on my current assignment is directly proportional to the operational costs for a business. At Interstate Batteries using RFID Technology we have a couple of web dashboards that displays inventory in the field, lists all the shops and their respective out of stock counts, shops that need to be serviced, and shops that have old batteries. Participating distributors(people who own the business of selling batteries) have sold their unwanted trucks(reducing operational costs), increased the amount of batteries sold for every stop made), reducing hot shots(delivering out of stock batteries) and increased sales at an average of 50% .

Transaction Services is a new field which allows users to have interaction with the databases. I am pretty sure MicroStrategy has improvements lined up in this section.

6 years

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8 out of 10.

9 out of 10.

MicroStrategy is my first BI tool.

It is straightforward to implement.

We sell it as an underlier to our own analytics tool. It works pretty well. 

It does not really impact the way we function, so much as what we sell. It is a good tool to help our customers visually see loads of data.

We will be using Dossier the most in 2018.

The dashboards. The visual end side. Being able to do visualizations is important. 

The Geospatial and mapbox stuff that will be coming out should be really helpful. I know that is something that we have wanted: the map. That is coming, so it is good.

There are areas for improvement. Training would be an area that they could improve upon, but otherwise it is a pretty good tool. 

It is very stable. We do not have any issues. 

We have not experienced any issues with the scalability.

The technical support is good. We always get very responsive care, but we are a reseller so we probably get a little bit more support. 

The initial setup is complex, because of the customer's data and the configuration is time consuming.

The technical support of MicroStrategy can be helpful through implementation.

Spend a lot of time with the training. If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Usability
• Stability 
• Good support. 

The use case for this is for our sales people who work in the field.

In terms of performance it's really good, they're giving good feedback.

I look at the front-end, the website. They have landing pages and that makes life easy for exhibiting things.

The architecture, it's very solid.

We are also using the Writeback capabilities. We are writing back to our CRM, Salesforce.

If they can make it more stable, in terms of the connectivity, that would help.

It is very stable. The only problem, I feel, is the connectivity - that has hiccups. Other than that, it's good.

Scalability is pretty straightforward.

We use tech support. They're knowledgeable and easy to contact.

It is easy because we didn't customize anything. If you know what are you doing then it's not difficult.

We are not yet using multi-media content in our ads, but we will. And we do have a capability for our mobile apps to work in offline mode.

When looking for a vendor the most important thing to us is the use case, the capabilities of the product.

I give it a six out of 10 because of the connectivity and a few other things. The main thing is the connectivity, and then there is the caching, so if they can work on that it would help.

Still, I would tell a colleague to definitely go for MicroStrategy.