Epicor Grow vs. MicroStrategy Analytics

Grow.com is well suited if you have a lot of data or client data to manage. If you do not have tons of data, there are other options out there that are a bit more simple and easy to use and a better price.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• I love the fact that you have a team of developers who can help me build metrics or fix metrics that I do not create properly. I had to learn SQL in order to really build the metrics that mattered, which was a lot of fun, but resulted in many broken metrics. The vendor's team was great in responding to me requests for help!
• Really, really appreciate the fact that Grow has SQL formulas to reference when building metrics. Again, as a novice, this accelerated my ability to learn and not have to leave your site and resources and stay within the Grow web properties.
• Great account managers who check in regularly and are willing to help out whenever needed.

Incentivized

• 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.

• There are basic labeling issues with some of the graph types. Wish there was more customizability here, especially on complex graphs.
• Could help more with analysis of data and trends, but that's going into full-fledged BI territory.
• The functionality of being able to snapshot data isn't quite there.

Incentivized

• The graph options are not as robust as an Excel user might want.
• The metadata layer can sometimes be slower, and it takes a long time for reports to run.
• Viewing the data feed entered can be cumbersome at times, in terms of validation with reports.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

This tool is definitely a little bit difficult to be able to figure out at first, but after some time of learning you can definitely pick it up. I do wish there were more resources online that would be able to help speed up the learning process

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support team is very helpful and in every situation we have needed help in, they have been able to assist. So I have had a good experience with them

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

We measured following KPI for the success

• Increase in Business Feeds Loads
• Reduction in Controllers Manual Work.
• Conversion of Manual Work into Systematic Workflows.
• Increase in Customer Spend
• Reduction in Service costs
• Reduction in time-to-market for new campaigns
• Increase in cross sell and Up sell
• Error reduction in customer Identification
• Existing client retained

Incentivized

Grow doesn't have as many advanced analytics features and other capabilities as some other 'dashboard' platforms on the market. Simply, if you want a tool for internal use only that has high-level analytics capabilities (regressions, completely custom visualizations, modeling), Grow probably isn't the platform for you. To put it another way, if you have a team of data engineers and scientists doing complex analysis, Grow might not make the most sense. However, if you understand the value of data/visualization/dashboards, but lack some of those skillsets in your company, Grow might be the perfect fit. Not only is it incredibly scalable and reasonably priced compared to other market solutions, but their transform capabilities really stand out. They have many native data transformations that mimic SQL coding of a dataset, without requiring any knowledge of SQL. They've converted these transformations to easy-to-use tools in the platform, which are perfect for the less-technical user.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Made it so much easier and faster to access data across tools
• Lessened the time exporting and uploading data to excel/sheets for analysis
• Made data and metrics more easily accessible to others in our orgs

Incentivized

• 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.