MicroStrategy Reviews

Pros

When i first started to use MicroStrategy, i was skeptical. The reason behind my skepticism was the huge amount of features that they offer. Usually it bounds to make the quality go down. However,for this particular software,it didn't happen. It's a great experience that helped me move up the ladder in the short span of my career.

Cons

The software can be a little slow sometimes. Sometimes the scaling is not perfect. The slow learning curve is also an issue.

Pros

The software is easy to install and get up and running. It handles a wide variety of data types and has many options for displaying data. They now have a compilable version that lets developers hard code the dashboards to work with input software which is nice (although a little pricey for smaller applications).

Cons

The user interface was less than intuitive, development support was not strong, and some of the features do not respond as expected. Specifically, maps do not appear to scale properly - I wound up with a much larger map (the entire northern hemisphere) than wanted (the continental USA) and could never get them to display properly unless I removed the data element and started over. Setting up dashboard frames to fit various screen sizes is a little complicated. Setting up “reusable frames” was a little difficult to master, because of the sidebar configuration tools.

Pros

In the Enterprise-wide complex Data Warehouse, MicroStragety reporting tool can connect to to the various data sources, may those be Relational or Non-relational and Cloud Systems too. This enables the overall architecture to import/export the data to/from them. The high availability of data connectors is the most helpful feature of the product.

Cons

The traditional reporting functionality needs little improvisation so that end users will be able to view the reports in the transitional/basic formats as per their requirement. The reports may also need to be broken down to requested granularity by business end users.

Pros

The technology is great. Even though this is one of the legacy BI vendors, their technology has kept up with the newer vendors.

Cons

The support has been slow for the past year or so.

Pros

Speed of the software when loading multiple dashboards are great once everything has been properly defined. Easy to update DWH and microstrategy connection.

Cons

Challanging to do metadata and mark the correct dependencies.
Design is outdated a bit
Hard for end user to learn how to make ad-hoc reports for themselves

Pros

- Full of advanced features like data storage in MicroStrategy cubes for faster reporting times, advanced grouping and filtering, ability to write your own SQL in the backend, ability to customize using SDK interface
- MicroStrategy Mobile is game changer. Great app and makes a solid impression on C-suite executives

Cons

- Initial setup takes time (If you compare with Tableau, etc, the setup of MicroStrategy is much more time intensive). Have to setup all attributes and measures beforehand.

Pros

The dashboards and reports that MicroStrategies is able to produce are beautiful, insightful, actionable, and informative. We have been using them for portfolio management and production reporting for several years and are pretty happy.

Cons

The setup can be cumbersome and the software did take awhile to learn. It's not incredibly intuitive like some of the programs I have used in the past, but the results are worth the efforts.

Pros

It works with the main Operative System, it doesn't need a expensive hardware to run. Excellent training program (not too expensive). It is easy to automate the sending of reports to user lists (great the report tool too because allow you to switch from a table to a chart in real time). It is a web based solution so it is accessible from any device from anywhere. generally user friendly because it helps the user to create the data cloud without having a thorough technical knowledge of SQL or programming. It is compatible with most data sources with connectors.
An important and unique feature is that of being able to insert comments, note and share the analysis.

Cons

It takes a long time to configure the software the first time (installation and connection to server). Old-fashioned design, the Desktop environment can be a bit more intuitive and quick.
Has a licensing system that is a bit too complicated. It should be improved data export functionality.

Pros

This is a very powerful software that allows us to manipulate mountains of data into usable reports. There are tons of options of how to format and organize the data into various reports for different audiences. The possibilities are basically endless.

Cons

It's not a very intuitive user interface, and can be very difficult to figure out the best way to accomplish a certain look for the reports you're generating. Often times, trial and error seems to be the best way to go. As I gain experience with the software, I'm sure this will become less of an issue.

Pros

Microstrategy has the ability to integrate with multiple data sources across the board from all channels of your companies data streams.

Cons

It is definitely not as easy to learn as tableu. The learning curve is a little steep but people switching from tableau should face couple of weeks of challenges.

Pros

The thing that I like most about this software is the ability that it has to bring in multiple different sources, from multiple different data types and allow the user to use them and present them in a way that is easily understandable. For example on my day to day job I work with excel files, data warehouse queries, and other kinds of data. I am easily with in a couple of minutes able to put all these different data types into one dossier for easy view and consumption for anyone in my business with a Microstrategy License.

Cons

There are a couple things that I don't like about Microstrategy. There are somethings that seem like they should have been there the whole time, for example if I wanted to look at trends over day, month, or week previously I would not be able to do that without creating a workaround for it. They are coming out with a release soon that will make that possible and easy to accomplish. I just feel like it should have been ther from the beginning

Pros

It is faster to implement and do not require too much customization. Most of the widgets and features are ready to use. The admin and user interfaces are intuitive and they do not generate errors or bugs during installation or heavy use by the end users. Very stable and reliable platform.

Cons

Price. They initial investment is higher comparing to another bundle software (Power BI, Tableau). However, the extra licensing is not very expensive since we can pay by active user. There is also a free end-user product (Desktop) that is focus on analytic end-users that do not require to modify objects but accessing dashboards and reports.

Pros

Versatile - Dashboard, charts and lists: analyze from a more macro perspective or go to the line detail
• Flexible - Receive reports by email and create alerts (datamining). Use dynamic filters or create your own personal analysis online
• Available - access via Web, Office andMobile
New ways to explore data (Dashboards)
Tailor made reports with scheduled deliveries
Ability to provide customers with OnLine access to Reports and Dashboards
Crossing information from multiple Base Data + creation of new InHouse objects
New ways to explore data (Visual Insight, Dashboards, Drills)
Accessing OnTheGo Information via Mobile
Fast + information + dynamic

Cons

Sometimes is not an easy learning curve.

Pros

It really have a lot of features and customization you can make. From metrics level and aggregations to web plugins.

Cons

The pricing, it is really expensive if in the organization doesn't use it really often. Need a really good server for grand amount of information

Pros

Evolving periodically for better.
Really good in maintaining data structures and hierarchy to ensure data integrity and consistency
Capable to do almost anything that other competitors have.
Hyper intelligence is a game changer in BI world.

Cons

1. Setup can be complicated and difficult since involved many parties (driver vendor, database vendor, etc) due to compatibility issues.
2. Prefer inner join, less support for outer join.
3. Relationship and data structures development can take lots of time and thought.

Pros

Scalable MicroStrategy was a helpful tool for providing daily, monthly, and quarterly reporting due to the ability to build automated reports that can be sent to large groups of people using distribution lists.,data from multiple SOR sources in the organization helped in monitoring our SLA management. security features to allow the report to be used by multiple roles and levelsMobile functionality

Cons

users not having ability to make changes to metrics and attributes without having to rely to heavily on MicroStrategy developers, it would make the product a great dea and more useful.

Pros

Number of functionnalities compared to challenger

Cons

Before the v10, Microstrategy was late on specific topics but now they did the good investment for the future.

Pros

The reliability was key. We had to refresh data weekly for over 2,000 dealerships and had many thousands of users, so it was important the dashboards were working 100% of the time.

Cons

It was difficult for our team to make updates to the dashboards when requested by our clients. Also, custom reports were a bit dofficult to create and schedule. Still a good reporting product, though, and a great value for the money because you can display all sorts of data in different ways (bar chart, pie chart, trend lines).

Pros

It has an immense amount of features, functionality, integrations, and plug-ins that can be used to better analyze data. It also has a strong analytical engine. It covers just about every need for enterprise business intelligence.

Cons

It is a heavy platform to setup, requiring dedicated servers, and in-depth knowledge on the application itself. It is not easy to architect a project without having specific training of the tool. It is fairly complex for developers.

Pros

Excellent User Interface
Lot of Drag and Drop features so new Users can learn this pretty easily
Lot of default virtualization and dashboards are present

Cons

Data cache memory is not large enough to hold terabytes of data
Join across different databases is not straighforward

Pros

This software is so versatile. It let's me slice and dice data from a variety of sources into user friendly dashboards and reports.

Cons

Building a new dashboard can be tedious but I'm not a programmer by trade. I have been able to isolate the reporting sources and fields and build my own dashboards it just hasnt been as fast or simple as I had hoped.

Pros

This software is loaded with features/functionality; I don't think I've run into anything that it just can't do. Their training and user forums are also extremely helpful.

Cons

Very steep learning curve for administration/development and requires very knowledgeable support staff to get and keep it going. I think that is to be expected with such a complex product however for a smaller company it can present challenges.

Pros

Ease of use: as a non-SQL user MSTR allows me to quickly and easily get the data I need in the format I need it in

Cons

Learning curve can be steep. Also charts and graph functions are lacking in the detailed formatting options you need to make a dashboard presentable for executive presentations

Pros

We use microstrategy to create custom dashboards for internal use and for our customers. We are able to create SSO from our customer portal to microstrategy to allow our customers to have access to their dashboards. With microstrategy you are able to provide summary level dashboards with links that allow you to click to drill down to receive further details. We are also able to provide links so the user can export the reports to excel so they can further filter the information as needed. The creation of cubes enables us to have the data calculations ready and available to reduce the response time to present dashboards to the end user.

Cons

Our customers would like to be able to subscribe to receive scheduled emails of their dashboards versus having to login to our portal to view the information. We have not be able to figure out how to provide them this feature.

Pros

It was easy to use and create adhoc reports. I was able to send out reports to my clients or those who I supported to give them a good look of their business.

Cons

It was hard to trust the data. When you can't trust the data then anything the software can do becomes mute. It was partly our fault but didn't love that aspect.