Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. MicroStrategy Analytics

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$9.99
per user/per month
MicroStrategy Analytics
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Editions & Modules
Power BI Pro
$9.99
per user/per month
Power BI Premium
4,995
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details—Must contact sales team for pricing information.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Considered Both Products
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Ease of use and it's fluent with Office products for exporting and presentations of data.
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Microsoft BI has an advantage over other BI platforms because it integrates nicely with the Microsoft products, such as Excel, Microsoft SQL, Access, and all the other parts of the Microsoft business. A user that has spent time with Microsoft products will find Microsoft BI to …
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Microsoft BI is mainly based on Microsoft SQL Server, so it is perfectly integrated. Many of the Microsoft BI components require using SQL Server as the database engine. Generally, the functionalities that are achieved when using SQL Server as a database engine are greater than …
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
One of the main reasons Microsoft BI was chosen by our company is because it is a reliable program. We tried different programs in the past (and currently also use other ones for certain reporting and analysis needs) but Microsoft BI was the least buggy out of our top choices.
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Oracle is primarily one amongst the leader in ERP applications and they have quite easily leveraged their BI products to offer pre-built dashboard and operational reporting which is received well by the users. But with Microsoft BI there are host of other features which beats …
Chose Microsoft BI (MSBI)
Microstrategy - I went with Microsoft BI because of features, usability, integration capabilities, performance, availability of talent, cost, and end-user (self-service) capabilities.
MicroStrategy Analytics
Chose MicroStrategy Analytics
[I feel like} Microsoft BI - MicroStrategy Analytics is worse in every way. Less templates, less canned reports, less third party integrations, less knowledgable consultants/employees, less core capability, much worse migration path to the cloud (Azure in Microsoft's case), and …
Chose MicroStrategy Analytics
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.
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 …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.6
49 Ratings
5% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
26 Ratings
20% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports9.042 Ratings10.023 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.049 Ratings10.023 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates8.947 Ratings10.024 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.7
49 Ratings
7% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
24 Ratings
21% above category average
Drill-down analysis8.944 Ratings10.022 Ratings
Formatting capabilities8.049 Ratings10.024 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.939 Ratings10.016 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.949 Ratings10.023 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.9
48 Ratings
6% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
23 Ratings
18% above category average
Publish to Web8.944 Ratings10.022 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.944 Ratings10.023 Ratings
Report Versioning8.940 Ratings10.020 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.943 Ratings10.022 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers8.924 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.9
48 Ratings
10% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
22 Ratings
21% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.947 Ratings10.020 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.944 Ratings10.019 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.942 Ratings10.018 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining9.01 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.9
49 Ratings
3% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
21 Ratings
15% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.946 Ratings10.019 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.943 Ratings10.020 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.946 Ratings10.020 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control9.01 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)8.928 Ratings10.09 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.5
39 Ratings
7% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
9.7
19 Ratings
20% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access8.036 Ratings10.019 Ratings
Mobile Application8.027 Ratings10.015 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile9.936 Ratings10.019 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Microsoft BI (MSBI)
8.8
21 Ratings
10% above category average
MicroStrategy Analytics
10.0
8 Ratings
23% above category average
REST API8.919 Ratings10.06 Ratings
Javascript API8.919 Ratings10.07 Ratings
iFrames8.918 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Java API8.917 Ratings10.04 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)8.918 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)8.017 Ratings10.06 Ratings
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Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Small Businesses
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Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
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Score 9.9 out of 10
Reveal
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Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 9.7 out of 10
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User Ratings
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(73 ratings)
9.9
(47 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.0
(25 ratings)
9.9
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(14 ratings)
3.2
(5 ratings)
Availability
9.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(15 ratings)
2.2
(5 ratings)
In-Person Training
6.9
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.5
(2 ratings)
9.0
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.6
(7 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Microsoft BI (MSBI)MicroStrategy Analytics
Likelihood to Recommend
Microsoft
Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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
Read full review
Pros
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Microsoft
  • The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
  • Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
  • Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Usability
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Microsoft
The product has been reliable.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Performance
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
Microsoft
While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Microsoft
This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Microsoft
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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Scalability
Microsoft
No answers on this topic
MicroStrategy
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Microsoft
  • 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.
Read full review
MicroStrategy
  • 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.
Read full review
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