Overview
What is MicroStrategy Analytics?
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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Strong and Easy Reporting
MicroStrategy Analytics Product Review
MicroStrategy -Powerful enterprise BI tool, can you handle it?
Microstrategy is the BEST BI tool out there...
Perfect data visualization tool for ease of generating reports and valuable customer insights!
MSTR Makes Data Analysis a Breeze
Intensive and reliable tool
Microstrategy , very good but..
MicroStrategy Review
MicroStrategy - excellent tool in the right hands
Integrated and efficient analytics solution
MSTR good for a structured environment
Simplifying reporting needs
Enterprise BI Solution - Not an Analytics solution
Popular Features
- Formatting capabilities (24)10.0100%
- Customizable dashboards (23)10.0100%
- Report Formatting Templates (24)10.0100%
- Pixel Perfect reports (23)10.0100%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
What is MicroStrategy Analytics?
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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21 people also want pricing
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What is Qlik Sense?
Qlik Sense® is a self-service BI platform for data discovery and visualization. It supports a full range of analytics use cases—data governance, pixel-perfect reporting, and collaboration. Its Associative Engine indexes and connects relationships between data points for creating actionable insights.
Product Demos
MicroStrategy Analytics Product Demo v 10
Augmented Reality - MicroStrategy Analytics Demo
MicroStrategy Analytics Product Demo v10 (With Voice)
MicroStrategy - Analytics Desktop (Basic) - Online Training Video by MicroRooster
MicroStrategy - Analytics (Visual Insight) - Online Training Video by MicroRooster
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 10Pixel Perfect reports(23) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 10Customizable dashboards(23) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 10Report Formatting Templates(24) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 10Drill-down analysis(22) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 10Formatting capabilities(24) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 10Integration with R or other statistical packages(16) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 10Report sharing and collaboration(23) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 10Publish to Web(22) Ratings
- 10Publish to PDF(23) Ratings
- 10Report Versioning(20) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 10Report Delivery Scheduling(22) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 10Delivery to Remote Servers(5) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 10Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(20) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 10Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(19) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 10Predictive Analytics(18) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
- 10Pattern Recognition and Data Mining(1) Ratings
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 10Multi-User Support (named login)(19) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 10Role-Based Security Model(20) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 10Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(20) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 10Report-Level Access Control(1) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
- 10Single Sign-On (SSO)(9) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 10Responsive Design for Web Access(19) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 10Mobile Application(15) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 10Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(19) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 10REST API(6) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 10Javascript API(7) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 10iFrames(5) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 10Java API(4) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 10Themeable User Interface (UI)(5) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 10Customizable Platform (Open Source)(6) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is MicroStrategy Analytics?
The platform integrates with a wide range of third-party data warehouses however. MicroStrategy also built a free discovery/visualization tool called MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop, which is not completely integrated with the rest of the platform. MicroStrategy has strong mobile and cloud capabilities which are differentiators for the platform. MicroStrategy's cloud offerings are unique in that they host the software in their own data centers and allow customers to keep their data on-premise to alleviate security concerns. Analytics is a platform for Business Intelligence (BI) and self-service analytics. It enables organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.
- MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise: Enterprise-grade business intelligence
- MicroStrategy Analytics Desktop: Free self-service visual analytics
- MicroStrategy Analytics Express: Free cloud-based self-service visual analytics
MicroStrategy Analytics Competitors
MicroStrategy Analytics Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(265)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
MicroStrategy Analytics is a versatile tool that is widely used across departments in various industries. Departments such as Accounting, Finance, and Audit have found the software to be invaluable in pulling policy level detail reports and generating month-end summary reports for the general ledger. This has greatly streamlined their reporting process and facilitated SOX audit testing. Additionally, multiple business units within organizations rely on MicroStrategy Analytics for financial decision-making and direct people impacting decisions.
Users have also found the software to be useful for prototyping, demoing to customers, analyzing functionality, implementing it, and advising customers on its implementation and usage. Its ability to provide a comprehensive view of company data and create live dashboards has made it an essential tool in achieving corporate strategic goals. It has also empowered department financial budget officers to easily view their budget values.
Furthermore, MicroStrategy Analytics is not limited to specific industries but is used across various sectors like finance, healthcare, and retail. It excels at creating web-based dashboards and mobile reporting, helping solve issues related to turnaround time, staffing, and tracking by utilizing data from scheduling programs and electronic medical record systems.
Overall, MicroStrategy Analytics serves as a full business intelligence enterprise solution by sourcing data from various database technologies, solving the problem of data silos organizations may face. Its versatility makes it a trusted tool for analyzing large datasets and providing valuable insights that drive informed decision-making.
Attribute Ratings
- 9.9Likelihood to Renew27 ratings
- 9Availability2 ratings
- 9Performance2 ratings
- 3.2Usability5 ratings
- 2.2Support Rating5 ratings
- 9Online Training5 ratings
- 9Implementation Rating4 ratings
- 9Configurability1 rating
- 9Product Scalability2 ratings
- 10Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 10Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 10Data Visualization1 rating
- 8.8Data Sources18 ratings
- 8Data Sharing and Collaboration18 ratings
Reviews
(26-47 of 47)Why we work with MicroStrategy Analytics
- Visualization
- Very fast query engine
- Complex analytics
- Full BI solution platform
- It should simple and easy to use
- SDK
- Flash move to html
"Enterprise" BI in Microstrategy
- Standard KPI reporting.
- Scheduled reporting.
- Simple dashboards.
- Easy report design and creation.
- Discovery - visually dig through the raw data.
- Real-time updates.
- Connections to alternate data sources (APIs, local files).
- Limited visualizations.
- Built-in statistics and forecasting (lack of).
Microstrategy is 'great enough' for business.
- Aggregate awareness.
- The ability for the SQL generator to select the correct aggregate table, whether a hierarchy or dates, is invaluable to organizations with less mature database developer resources.
- Delivery of reports, particularly web-based delivery.
- Microstrategy provides the most options for report delivery, scheduling, and formats; a requirement of self-service BI.
- Managing metadata
- Microstrategy's architecture prefers a star schema; this can serve as a virtual ER builder and help locate possible bottlenecks in the database design.
- Scheduling delivery; the use of schedules is very inflexible.
- Instead of building specific delivery objects, a schedule builder (similar to MS Outlook) will push Microstrategy ahead of the competition. The schedule objects add to the maintenance.
- FTP/sFTP delivery options.
- Internal delivery to file systems and availing the file location to FTP is good, but often times external FTP/sFTP is required. Currently, BI engineers have to build external processes to deliver to external FTP.
- Desktop dashboard development; it is a bit disjointed.
- Dashboard development options are different between desktop (now called developer) and web are different. We often have developer and web open at the same time to build dashboards.
- Architect product; still hasn't gained global acceptance for schema management.
- More flexible cross-tab development.
- There's an idea I have about joining data sets where there's aggregate data combined with crosstab data. The example i use is a annual budget (metric) along side monthly spend (metric). Today, the annual budget must be an attribute which means it cannot be used in calculations.
Ground level perspective of MicroStrategy
- Extremely fast and reliable sql generation, report and document development.
- Flexibility and integration with nearly all data sources.
- Self reliant product, many out of the box products that allow easy maintenance, development, and monitoring.
- Cost of product is more reasonable than many other in its class.
- Reports and documents produced can be pixel perfect and allow for extremely custom dashboards and scorecards.
- There are many tools and products in the whole Analytics suite, I find this cumbersome and would like to see all these tools brought together
- There is no version control built into the product. Versioning seems outdated and the principle way of handling versions is outdated and I think should be remodeled.
- To a new user, learning the entirety of all MicroStrategy products is difficult and can take a long time to adapt to.
Go Self Service Business Intelligence
- Metadata layer
- Self service BI
- Easy and fast deployment
- Users community is missing
- Possibility to customize (sdk) is hard to learn
May not be suitable for all audience!
- Designing of the Architecture
- Ability to create highly interactive dashboards
- Handle large amounts of data
- Compatible with most of the data sources
- The development environment (Desktop) can be a little bit more intuitive. The UI is still more like 90s
- Ease of use for the end user to analyze data (ability to add comments/annotate) and share
- Include more informative and visually appealing visuals as well as widgets.
Microstrategy is not a walk in the park
- Fantastic features for mobile applications. Out of all of the BI tools out there, it is by far the best on an iPad
- Lots of features for the end-user to custom the output of reports
- In-memory processing allows for very quick responses
- It has a very steep learning curve for report developers. I found it the most difficult to learn from a developer perspective
- A lot of system administration overhead is required. Probably not suitable for a small organization. The cloud version would probably be better.
- The remote training that they offer (such as through the PEP program) is terrible. I had training classes online that would've been better served getting a root canal. Training is one of their most deficient areas in my opinion.
Empower your Sales Teams and boost ROI!
- Ease of creating Advertiser Based Playbooks that empowered sellers during their sales call.
- Flexible to update, modify, and uniformly deploy.
- At times more set templates were restrictive and not adjusting to accommodate more data points.
- Refreshes of certain data points prevented daily frequency.
- Formatting at times would reset to defaults.
Update Dec-14, this continues to be a game changer for our decision making and ability to flex with the changing media landscape.
MicroStrategy - Great for some, overkill for most.
- MicroStrategy is a very powerful BI tool that, with the right training, can open the world of analysis to consumers, allowing your data to assist the masses with important business decisions, by offering a layer of abstraction between your data and users.
- MicroStrategy does a good job with any type of security model you need to implement. Security can be regulated on a large scale down to the object level. Sending reports to multiple people and being able to limit the data to each of those people based on group security is a phenomenal aspect.
- The flexibility of dashboards, reports and grids within MicroStrategy desktop was remarkable and allowed for a highly customized BI interface.
- Administration and implementation of MicroStrategy exposed fatal flaws in their software as a whole. I expected much, much higher quality software for the licensing/pricing demanded from MicroStrategy.
- Although their tech support staff were always friendly, it took multiple (and I mean multiple) attempts to solve issues, some of which were never resolved. Many of which were drawn out for weeks with support staff asking me to perform troubleshooting steps that I'd outlined I'd already performed in the ticket comments when posted. Just very ineffective support as a whole.
- Their error code base is not well documented. I can't count how many times I found an error being thrown and could not find reference of what that error meant, or was caused by. I found many people complaining about the same error in their community discussion boards, with no responses from anyone at MicroStrategy offering assistance.
Disruptive Analytics
- Security
- Simplicty
- Functionality
- Pricing structure
- Product bundling
- Graph refreshment (redesign)
A partner's view of MicroStrategy Analytics
- Ease of implementation
- Ease of use
- Ease of scale
- Establish direct connection with WPS Software to allow easier take-outs of SAS Software
Business Analytics Can Improve Quality of Service
- CAMERA is our major dashboard: Corporate Account Management Electronic Reporting Application
- It pulls data from multiple sources in the organization and helps monitor our SLA management.
- Reporting for masses the without going through a dedicated account!!
- Web reporting needs to be aligned with mobile reporting. One stop shop.
Analyzing the Analytics- MicroStrategy Analytics
- Scalability- build once and apply security features to allow the report to be used by multiple roles and levels
- Mobile functionality
- More visualizations- when your user base is comfortable with the charts in Excel not being able to replicate them causes reduced user adoption
Classroom and business experience from a college student
- Viewing results in different ways.
- Using filters is easy on MicroStrategy.
- Training is very helpful and clear.
- The icons of the tools.
- The layout of the tools.
- Higher definition in general
Fine for reporting, not for ad hoc analytics
- Great for reporting that has stabilized (not changing much over time)
- Drill-down/through is great for facilitating an interactive discussion with business leaders
- Report-sharing helps keep the data on the back-end, reducing the emailing of large Excel files
- Our team of business analysts needed a nimble tool for ad hoc analytics. MicroStrategy required greater technical knowledge than our typical user possessed and the process of creating a new view was extremely cumbersome and time-consuming.
- We regularly needed to combine data from our warehouse with other data sources. While MicroStrategy has this capability, the level of technical knowledge required was beyond that of a typical business analyst and took too long. Part of the challenge was that our IT department imposed tight governance on the introduction of new data into the warehouse (which is common), so the minimum SLA on this process was 4 hours. This is simply not acceptable when a senior executive needs analysis for a decision right away. While I cannot fault MicroStrategy for our company's IT governance policy, they should add the capability to combine data from the warehouse with data outside the warehouse without requiring that it be added to the warehouse.
- While MicroStrategy has some light-weight and reasonably priced user licenses, the capabilities we needed for ad hoc analysis required a far more expensive user license.
Solid enterprise level reporting & BI with a cost (difficult to integrate new data sets)
- Navigate large sets of data with ease.
- Process data quickly.
- Build templated reports that are useful to senior management.
- Limited flexibility to edit data connections / data behind application on the fly.
- Not the most user-friendly GUI.
- Locked down application without some of the "open" benefits of an application like Tableau.
- Do you want to be able to bring in data on the fly, easily, or do you want to be limited to what lives in your data warehouse
- Do you want to be able to develop quick ad-hoc reports & insights, or are pre-built reports more important to you
- Is cost a main concern? Do you need to tie ROI to this tool in order to get funding?
MicroStrategy Review (Version 9)
- MicroStrategy was a helpful tool for providing daily, monthly, and quarterly reporting due to the ability to build automated reports that can be sent to large groups of people using distribution lists.
- I found MicroStrategy very helpful when putting together monthly performance reviews using the visual reporting tools. The ease with which I was able to switch from data tables to charts as a better way to tell stories about complicated data sets was particularly useful.
- When we needed to pull user information for targeted marketing campaigns, MicroStrategy dramatically reduced the amount of time we spent tying User IDs to user activity within our DMP. In turn, we were able to leverage the data to create user segments which helped us focus our marketing spend more effectively for marketing campaigns.
- Perhaps it was the nature of the size of the company I previously worked for, but the amount of time it took for changes and upgrades to be implemented was a bit frustrating at times.
- It would be incredibly helpful if users had the ability to make changes to metrics and attributes without having to rely to heavily on MicroStrategy developers, it would make the product a great deal more useful.
- Being able to distribute rich MicroStrategy reports without sending enormous emails was problematic at times. If there was a way to let data rich reports being distributed via email live in a web environment would be a big plus for the platform.
- Being unable to view reports on smartphones was a bit of a pain at times as well, particularly when you need to send reports to colleagues working off-site without a laptop or desktop computer available.
MicroStrategy- Easy to learn and use
- Having the ability to "Subscribe" or schedule queries is a nice convenience.
- Easy for non-technical people to learn.
- Ability to export data into Excel, TXT, PDF.
- Pivot functionality.
- There is no ability to build your own queries. You're only able to select from pre-prompted measures and dimensions (groupings).
- Charting capabilities are basic.
- Most of the time I use MicrosStrategy to extract the data and manipulate it in Excel to get it to the desired state.
Micromanage your Business with Microstrategy
- Proficient data management for a multitude of attributes- this allows for a bank of knowledge for report building and analysis.
- User friendly making it a relevant partner in my day to day job.
- Web based function allowing for flexibility and ease of access from varying locations.
- Restraints on data exports by column and row can be constraining.
- Some user frustration due to time constraints at different levels of data.
- At beginning, hard to determine difference in metrics and attributes to aid in report creation.
Srini's MSTR review
- Data segmentation is a real strength. I used it extensively to pull data based on geographic and customer demographic lenses
- Speed. Especially with the basic builders which housed most of the reports I needed, the performance was outstanding. The datamart is huge.
- Visualization is a strength as well. I felt this was an underrated feature but MSTR produced great graphs.
- While performance was a strength of basic builders, advanced buiders were lacking in performance.
- Same with visualization. Graphs weren't easy for everyone and you needed bit more technical expertise. Tableau is a great example of how easy it should be for everyone to visualize graphs.
Reporting and Analysis for the Non-Techie
- Drag and drop analysis for users that don't need any database knowledge or programming experience.
- Beautiful dashboards that load quickly and provide instant snapshots and/or trends over time.
- Ability to extend from desktop to mobile with relative ease.
- Microstrategy Web and Microstrategy Desktop work slightly differently. There are still some functions that need to be completed in the Desktop software that are not available through a browser.
- Web-based dashboards still utilize Flash. I expect to hear about a transition to HTML5 or something similar, but have not yet heard about this. Microstrategy Mobile solutions do not require Flash.
- Product licensing is difficult to understand.
Need a BI tool? MSTR is for you!
- Nice front end for complex SQL reports.
- Display of the data in the MSTR UI.
- If you know Excel, then MSTR is easy to use from an end user perspective. It is stable and runs cross platform/browser.
- The UI is kinda dated and not very polished. An engineer designed it - there was no UI designer nor workflow optimization expert. There are many screens which should be optimized, and the UI could be more polished.
- The system requires significant hardware investment. If you are looking for a system which is responsive, then you should spring for the extra RAM and CPU power as the MSTR stores things in memory. It would be nice if it could summarize the data in a way to make it run faster.
- Exporting data could be better - MSTR uses the same path to display data to the UI as it does to export it (writing to a file).
- Even though MSTR says it is DB agnostic, it is not. We tested MS SQL and it was significantly slower and harder to work with than the native MSTR DB.
2. How large of a server farm do you have? Is there a large budget for hardware (MSTR like to have lots of RAM, CPU, and disk space).
3. Do you have a dedicated MSTR developers or contractors? It can take a while for this to be developed, and not everyone can "find out easily" where to go to do things. Documentation is not a strong point... so you need someone who already knows MSTR.