Longview Analytics vs. Mediafly vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

It is very suitable for complete corporate BI solutions. If you see BI as embedding information into your organization and business processes, and thus as more than just a few scattered dashboards and reports, arcplan is your platform. It's less suitable for ad-hoc reporting and data discovery. It can do it (everything is possible), but there is strong competition in this area.

InsightSquared has been a great tool for quick reference dashboards for the whole organization and teams within the sales org. It presents a standardized individual dashboard for all the reps on the team. It doesn't fare well when trying to deep dive things like campaign and lead source inquiries, as well as activities associated with that opportunity.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• Excellent dashboard.
• Well advanced BI metrics.
• Better interfacing to other DW.

Incentivized

• The dashboard is amazing: easily customize your view so you can view all the data that is most relevant to you at a glance
• Sales metrics: see how you are comparing to your peers, from every possible angle. InsightSquared gathers all the data you need to know, want to know, and didn't even know you wanted!
• Predictive statistics and the likelihood of a deal to fail or succeed is quite useful in a sales environment where time efficiency is key. Need to know what deals to focus on? You can see exactly what deals need more TLC, which ones are likely to close, and which ones to stop wasting time on.

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Positioning and marketing. Most BI vendors use a non-technical sales strategy and focus on shiny, sexy dashboards to sell the story. In order to position arcplan fairly and correctly, the technical and business advantages need to be part of a sales story. So, it is not really an easy product to sell to customers, if it has to compete with now-to-wow-five-minute products.
• Learning/training for developers. It's easy to learn the basics of arcplan, because the interface is logical. But nothing prevents a beginning developer from creating a monstrous application, because there is no prescribed architecture. It really takes some experience to become a good arcplan architect. It's a disadvantage resulting from one of arcplan's biggest advantages.
• Data connectors: arcplan standard comes with a connector of your choice. Additional connectors need to be purchased separately. Many other products come with a full range of connectors.

• I know this is something they have in process, but I would love to be able to customize reports myself. The support team is always super responsive and makes sure that we're taken care of. But, it would be great to just be able to log in and change the small things myself.
• I recently downloaded the InsightSquared app to my phone, and I'd like to see more functionality there. Currently. You are only able to see dashboards that have a already been created.

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

InsightSquared has been hugely beneficial to us, and to me in particular as someone outside of our sales team to gain insight into how our sales team and company is performing and how our overall health is. They offer fantastic customer support and have a great community to assist in your implementation of the product.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

InsightSquared is easy to use overall. Running reports and creating dashboards is quick and easy - drag and drop functionality. All reports have multi-filter options allowing you to drill down into your data. Scorecards for employees help show how quickly a rep can start selling after they join your team. Activity ratios provide insight into what it takes from a KPI standpoint to close a deal.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

Every time I go to use InsightSquared it has been available and fully functional

The product has been reliable.

The Best

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

InsightSquared has a very responsive team, and always willing to help with reporting needs which are not able to be completed in house. They do offer a professional services team at an additional cost, so if your reporting is very complex, or you have a team that is continuously changing the type of metrics they require as a business, their support team will be an invaluable asset for you.

Incentivized

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

Personally, I prefer QlikView not because it's more stable but simply just for the looks of the dashboard. One of my clients in Sydney recently moved from arcplan to QlikView. The reason was mainly looks and that QlikView has more training materials for the support users to train with. So in all, it does not really stack well against QlikView.

Incentivized

I was not involved in our purchasing of this platform, so comparing it is difficult. This being said, it's most similar to constantly running reports in Salesforce, probably. SFDC offers more flexibility, obviously, but InsightSquared offers better visualization, less report updating, and more features dedicated to making analytics more enjoyable. It's worth the cost of the platform to save your admin time in reporting.

Incentivized

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

• Since implementing Mediafly we have seen 140% higher ARR in deals.
• Win rates have increased by 45%.
• Our value consultants are able to take on 2x more deals at a time.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized