Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. TrackMaven

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

If your brand is looking for understanding competitors and normalizing data across disparate follower counts/footprint size, Trackmaven is great. Users need to understand the power of Boolean logic. TrackMaven needs dedicated users and time spent in building reports in order to understand how to use it.

Incentivized

• 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

• Competitive Intelligence - see precisely what your competitors are posting and sort by time and/or impact
• Funnel Analysis (Beta as of April 2017) - track your organic and paid social efforts to see which content creates leads
• Comprehensive Overview of Social Channels - track growth and engagement of all social channels in one screenshot, and in comparison to your closest competitors
• Personalized Analytics - each user can set up their own reports and dashboards and/or they can be shared across the organization, chart your own KPIs with a click of a button
• Top Notch UX & Support - drag and drop features for report building and dashboard creation, responsive support team

• 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

• For the foreseeable future. TrackMaven is focused on measuring social sharing. We wish it also captured information about pageviews and monthly unique visitors -- the kind of data that lives inside Google Analytics -- or integrated it through an API. It would be exceptionally helpful not just to have all those metrics in one place, but also to easily measure correlations between them.

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.

More than likely, yes. This is a company with people I trust that offer an exceptional product.

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

The product has been reliable.

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.

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.

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

I inherited TrackMaven, as it was already being used when I started working here, but I really like it! It's much easier to use and has an incredibly fast learning curve so I feel like I'm using all of the features of the tool right away. The customer support team is very helpful and works hard to make sure that you are really using the product to its full capabilities, rather than just scratching the surface

• 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

• Paid Search & Social - TrackMaven has given us the ability to develop smarter social advertising and reach our audience with the right messages
• Account Analytics - the account overview we receive in TrackMaven of our own social media accounts is duplicative of what we already get through other software
• Funnel Analysis - If we can better see which efforts are paying off with leads, at a granular level, we can use our social spend budget more wisely