Reveal vs. MicroStrategy Analytics

As a company responsible for people money we have to deal with following challenges every day: Clients who want to track the status of their transfers. Licensing agencies who need to ensure professional standards are met. Internal team managers who need to track client and staff progress to ensure company progression and success. Reveal does a good job as self-service tool enabling the accountable parties to have full access to important insights 24/7. The prebuilt dashboard themes save time and investment as we don’t need to hire a dedicated data analyst. The interactive dashboards give full transparency. The ability to easily create, analyze and report keeps clients, partners and stuff on the same page.

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

• Ease of Use - Reveal is super intuitive when it comes to creating dashboards. You don't need to be a data expert, which is key for me.
• Sharing - The ability to share across our teams, locations, and with clients is great. We create teams for our different clients and share dashboards there that also are connected to our company dashboards.
• Support and Roadmap - Reveal support has been great. They care about the needs of their customers. They have released 3 updates in the last few months, and they are adding a lot of value.

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 a limited number of templates, but this is something they say they are working on.
• Cost is reasonable for individual personal use, but prohibitive to small companies looking to embed their services in their own App.
• Responses to emails for support can be delayed, but what else is new?

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

As a developer of the project, I feel comfortable with this tool for its peculiarities: acceptable costs, simple configuration, creation and maintenance of simple reports, fairly complete account management, also, not least, I appreciate the work done by their technical support always timely intervention and, above all, resolutive.
Furthermore, as far as end users are concerned, I found a good appreciation of the proposed 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

Reveal has a great usability for any level of computer user. The only major thing I see that is not exactly user friendly, is the color scheme issue I stated earlier in my review. Although, I am coming from a graphic design background, I need a platform that every team member in our office can use.

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.

This assessment is due to the fact that I have not yet found Reveal not available for use. Apart from some problems of development crash, then fixed by the product assistance service, I have not found any particular problems or loss of time caused by the instrument.

Incentivized

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

The pages load rather quickly even in the presence of several elevations in the same dashboard that insist on different data sources and with visualizations that insist on different types of graph. I can only be satisfied with these performances.

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

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.

None in particular, however, would be welcome if improvements were made in the personalization of the prospects and in the connection between them (perhaps being able to transfer the selections present in one prospect to another recalled by the first).

Incentivized

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

Lacks ability to generate analytics as complex as Tableau and not as easy to embed and interface with other software and databases as Looker. But a very good option for those not needing the complexities found in other products.

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 evaluation is the result of the fact that I have not had the opportunity to deepen the Reveal interface with other tools and / or other software, so the evaluation that I am giving follows what I have been able to read regarding the characteristics of the product online.

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

• We have the best platform for visualizing data for better understanding
• The drag and drop features saves time
• With data from multiple sources, we get the right intelligence to drive our business forward.
• While it is expensive, the benefits outweighs the high cost

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.