MicroStrategy Analytics is an enterprise business analytics and mobility platform. Key features include automatic big data analysis and reporting, data discovery and visualization, digital security credentials, and support for mobile devices.
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Tableau Desktop
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
We didn't select MicroStrategy, our IT department did. The team has since moved to Tableau, which is better suited to their needs.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose MicroStrategy Analytics
Tableau is probably MicroStrategy Analytic's biggest competitor I've noticed over time, and I'm not sure why. Tableau only covers visualizations independently for each business user, which then creates the issues of every employee creating their own version of the data, and …
Tableau is a user friendly environment that creates visualizations, reports, and dashboards. The performance of Tableau is bad when querying large data sets. Users are not able to customize their reports as easily in Tableau as they can in MicroStrategy. Analysis and modeling …
Microstrategy has a more centralized vision, the new version is making an approach to Tableau or Power BI in the data preparation and fast creation of data visualization. QlikView is maybe similar in the vision to centralize the administration. Microstrategy analytics is the …
Tableau was more costly and took longer to learn to use. While it does have some perks (such as no metadata layer), I find using the online version of Tableau is not as fast as the online version of Microstrategy, and creating data descriptors is easier in the latter. Tableau …
Microstrategy is already used in the organization and it clearly is used by many leading industries. Tableau and Salesforce are comparatively new to this.
Factors in going with MicroStrategy Analytics are cost, cloud saas, ease of integration, strong peer community, strong consulting partnership, and pre-existing relationships. The cost factor and pre-existing relationships played a defining role in the selection of the product.
I found Birst to be a good tool when using perfectly normalized data, like they do on their demo. If your data or model are not perfect, the tool doesn't automatically figure out anything, so you have to do a lot of manual work. Also, the tool is not mature enough. For …
Manager, Business Intelligence and Reporting Services
Chose MicroStrategy Analytics
As a whole Microstrategy is good in more areas than the others are great in specific ones. It is probably not #1 in any particular category of BI Tool evaluations, but they are #2 or #3 in more categories than the all of the other tools we have evaluated. We selected …
My current work environment uses both Tableau Online, MicroStrategy & SSRS in parallel. Tableau is much closer to the SSRS in terms of visualization tool where as MicroStrategy is an enterprise data modeling and reporting tool.
Based on the use case we use different tools. Here …
eCommerce Manager Florida/Latin America & Caribbean
Chose Tableau Desktop
Tableau focuses in telling the story, which is a fundamental piece that is hardly found today on any analytics suite. Adobe Analytics is fantastic collecting data but it is very rigid when manipulating the data and building meaningful reports. In my opinion Adobe Analytics is a …
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Tableau Desktop
Tableau wins when it comes to the features and flexibility it brings to the table. microstrategy seems out-dated in comparison to Tableau and Dundas BI
But, it loses out to Dundas BI in terms of cost-effectiveness due to Dundas BI's low-cost offering in case of a larger number …
Performance: Power BI does not stack up against Tableau if there are huge amounts of data needs to report or dashboarding. The visualization interface of Tableau is much more user-friendly than its competitors. Therefore, we are using the Tableau for our reporting, …
Tableau is a very, very powerful analytics tool that is very flexible with that said there are always some programs that will do specific tasks much better, I would highly suggest Tableau as I use it for marketing analysis, sales reporting and even for analysis on e-commerce …
In comparison to Tableau, the other dashboarding/BI tools I've used feel clunky, are very slow to develop in, and seem to lack features of a more modernized tool like Tableau. In Pentaho Analyzer, for instance, trying to include multiple worksheets or reports in a single …
I had the trial version of Tableau Desktop downloaded, installed, configured and was creating meaningful dashboards in almost 15 minutes. While other software we used had great features, none of them were able to compare with this trial experience. Tableau's user forums were …
MSTR is great for any organization that is looking for a way to deliver complicated data in an uncomplicated way. From business teams to marketing and finance, several departments benefit from using MSTR to keep track of KPIs enabling teams to make optimizations along the way. MSTR provides great visual representations of data enabling team members to distill thousands of data points into easily digestible charts and graphs
Tableau Desktop is one the finest tool available in the market with such a wide range of capabilities in its suite that makes it easy to generate insights. Further, if optimally designed, then its reports are fairly simple to understand, yet capable enough to make changes at the required levels. One can create a variety of visualizations as required by the business or the clients. The data pipelines in the backend are very robust. The tableau desktop also provides options to develop the reports in developer mode, which is one of the finest features to embed and execute even the most complex possible logic. It's easier to operate, simple to navigate, and fluent to understand by the users.
They sell the product well, and make promises you will actually believe
"checks the box" for most features a company would need. Doesn't actually deliver them though
They answer the phone in a timely manner. Can't answer your questions or provide support, but the queue time isn't bad
They have online documentation. It's not up to date, and likely doesn't reflect the version of software you are using, but hey... they can point to it.
An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.
I would always choose to renew MicroStrategy as long as they lead the market in features, functionality and price. The support of MicroStrategy is timely and professional, I frequently get answers to my questions within 24 hours and normally have solutions within 48 hours. Training available for MicroStrategy completely covers everything required to be able to expertly use MicroStrategy and understand data warehousing.
Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.
The standard grid reporting could look more like the styling and object used for the Import and Visual Insight products. In addition, object properties almost seem to be hidden when first using the product. It's as if they are asking the engineers to only use the presets we make available...and, these presets are 10+ years old. On the positive side, Microstrategy seems to be the only product, not named Cognos, which can scale to Big Data. The product is "hackable" via the SDK or tricking the Intelligence Server to do uncommon things. The Microstrategy development team also seems to be very involved with their OEM partners; especially when it comes to features and enhancements. A large majority of the improvements we suggested have made it into the product or on the roadmap for future enhancements. Only suckas fall for the shiny objects from most other vendors; Microstrategy is really the only choice for Enterprise BI.
Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.
I've never had an issue with MicroStrategy not being available due to MicroStrategy application malfunction. It is very robust and only failures I've seen were due to user error or the platform the machine running the service failed some how.
When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.
Being able to customize the performance based on the business need is extremely powerful. Proper configuration and understanding of the usage pattern is key, if the technical ability of the architect is not at top level, then the product will not be configured correctly which will lead to poor performance.
Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast
Good user community. Support team is available if you are under AMC. You get decent support after raising the support ticket. If it is product bug they will inform you and let you know which patch will resolve the same.
I have never really used support much, to be honest. I think the support is not as user-friendly to search and use it. I did have an encounter with them once and it required a bit of going back and forth for licensing before reaching a resolution. They did solve my issue though
It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
I have attended many trainings offered by MicroStrategy; both distance and in-person training. I earned my CRD (Certified Report Developer) certification via the online training. I found the training to be well organized and concise. Overall I will definitely continue to increase my knowledge with MicroStrategy via the online training offering.
The training for new users are quite good because it covers topic wise training and the best part was that it also had video tutorials which are very helpful
Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.
Tableau is probably MicroStrategy Analytic's biggest competitor I've noticed over time, and I'm not sure why. Tableau only covers visualizations independently for each business user, which then creates the issues of every employee creating their own version of the data, and then you have 20 versions of the truth. A enterprise data warehouse and MicroStrategy's Visual Insight is a better method.
If we do not have legacy tools which have already been set up, I would switch the visualization method to open source software via PyCharm, Atom, and Visual Studio IDE. These IDEs cannot directly help you to visualize the data but you can use many python packages to do so through these IDEs.
This software is extremely scaleable, one can add more core servers which performs as a load balancing. The configurations available to manage usage patterns and daily activity are as high a caliber as any other enterprise level software. This product can be installed on both a windows and unix platform allow for integration on a budget.
Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.
MicroStrategy was helpful for reducing the amount of time we needed to spend number crunching large data sets, and in doing so, allowed me as the primary users to spend more time gleaning insights from the data that in turn informed our leadership team to make strategic decisions.
By creating numerous canned reports available to all members of the team through email distribution or basic access to the platform, we were able to reduce the time I spent showing people how to pull the data in Microsoft Excel by nearly 40% .
We ended up needing to make many changes to the way our DMP was feeding data into MicroStrategy due to incorrect reporting that caused complications in accounting and finance.
Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.