Lightspeed Retail is a retail PoS system from Lightspeed headquartered in Quebec. Core retail POS features are expanded on higher service tiers with ecommerce option and payments gateway, an accounting system, and a customer loyalty program.
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MicroStrategy Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
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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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NCR Voyix Counterpoint
Score 6.0 out of 10
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NCR CounterPoint is a retail management solution, from NCR Corporation. The software features point of sale, an inventory management system, customer management, and reporting and analytics.
We interviewed quite a few systems while researching a POS replacement for our current retail store. We had things like a second store, a fully integrated website, accounting system integrations, inventory management, restaurant-style ordering integrations, etc. in mind as we …
It is perfect for any small business looking for inventory control, Tracking purchase history, and just an all round easy to use software for retail and beyond. I would not use it if I have only a few hundred items or was a larger company that can afford to build my own POS software.
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
It is a definite solution for a basic store point of sale, we prefer Ingenico card swipes and Epson receipt printers and have had great, reliable success. We have setup the same system at events with VPN connectivity to its server and it works very well with the only bottle-neck being connectivity, this did cause a 3-8 second delay with receipt printing, but was manageable. Mobile tablet in store works well with credit card sales, and can print wirelessly, cashless here is best. Inventory managem[e]nt is vast, with terrific reporting.
Lightspeed Retail has great reports that are very easy to read and understand.
Lightspeed Retail is great to train new employees on because of its ease of use. There are not lots of different things that you have to learn just basics.
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.
Offline mode -- your POS server can go down - you can still ring sales. Your internet can go down, and you can still ring sales and accept chip-based credit cards. Wow.
Mobile and wireless. Mobile -- you can take your POS on the road and ring sales out in the field, at trade shows or at a flea market booth. Wireless inventory, and order picking - you can walk around the store and ring sales, perform inventory, pick orders, intake items, edit pricing, print labels, etc. Again - Wow.
Magento integration -- with the help of a 3rd party connector, we're integrating our CP system tightly with our Magento based website. This keeps us working out of one system with multiple channels.
E-Plum scale software integration -- we can update prices and information within our scales with this integration, right out of CP
With a larger SKU assortment size, the software really starts to struggle with doing physical inventory after scanning in a few hundred items.
Several times throughout each year Lightspeed went down on us (not our internet connection but actually Lightspeed verified).
Special order system could use a lot of modern improvements (ability to schedule ahead of time, etc.)
Reports are very basic, and will likely require there Lightspeed Analytics to actually get reports useful for day to day operations.
Weak system for receiving purchase orders.
Does not handle items and cases for reordering very well. Have used multiple Point of Sale systems in the past 10 years that allow to set reorder points based on single items, but reorder the case automatically, Lightspeed has no support for this.
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.
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.
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.
I gave the rating of a 9 because ninety percent of the time when I talk to their support they're very helpful. One of the only real issues I have is there are times where the queue will be 7-9 people deep. When you have an error you don't know how to fix, sometimes this is very troubling. But overall their support is usually quick and friendly.
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 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.
Lightspeed is faster, sleeker and more modern than our previous POS system. I can’t express enough how easy the online store portion of Lightspeed is - it just intuitive and sometimes, is TOO easy, I feel like I have to be forgetting something. Lightspeed is staying modern and current where our previous POS was not
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.
We interviewed quite a few systems while researching a POS replacement for our current retail store. We had things like a second store, a fully integrated website, accounting system integrations, inventory management, restaurant-style ordering integrations, etc. in mind as we made our way through that process. We also made our way around the area to see what other retailers - similar to us - were using as a POS system. After much deliberation, many demos and conference sales calls, we settled on NCR CP because this system did everything we wanted and so much more. But perhaps the biggest reason why we went with NCR was the local support availability. There's more than one player in that field available in the greater NYC area, and we are very happy with the current support team but we also know that should we want or need to, we can switch support to another team, and have no issues going forward. That was a big part of this decision for sure.
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.
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.
