We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and MicroStrategy based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Users gave Microsoft BI higher ratings. Compared to MicroStrategy, Microsoft BI has slightly better features, and users were happy with the ROI.
"There is also a chart store where we can download charts, which is extremely useful."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an easy-to-use tool."
"It's easy to create reports and it's easy to download the data from the corresponding report."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."
"It is very well integrated with other Microsoft products, including PowerApps and Excel, as well as Access, so it fits well into our workflow."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"The product is user-friendly."
"I think what we're currently excited about is the ability to integrate R. Most of our data scientists use R for their modeling. I heard at one of the sessions, here at MicroStrategy World 2018, that you can put your R scripts directly into MicroStrategy, so any modeling effort that you've done in the past can be transferred into MicroStrategy."
"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."
"It has had a direct impact on bottomline improvements."
"I really like the visualizations. I like how you can put large data sets in there, then the user can quickly go through the data and drill down at various levels to understand things."
"I think we have a huge enterprise-wide push to Visual Insight. Our environment has transformed over the last year. We were a strong "grid to PDF," "document to PDF," that's all we did. And then they came in with these Visual Insights and everyone was like, "Wow, that's kind of cool." We created a static reporting portal behind it and now, it's just taken our reports to another level. The level of insight that you get in a 30-second glimpse, it just revolutionized it for us. It gives the user a larger subset of the data so that they can actually maneuver around, rather than being specifically pointed at whatever your document is designed for."
"I have shown our users how to stop using Excel. They would create these vast Excel files, and I showed them how to do the same thing with MicroStrategy, which saves a significant amount of time for them everyday."
"The most valuable features are ad hoc reporting and the ability to create dashboards."
"We use MicroStrategy as an integrated solution with some of their other CRM type applications."
"It has come a long way in terms of how it was working two years ago, but there are some things that you still can't do with it. For example, permission management and user access management are still a bit limited. It is basically based on the idea that everybody from the organization can see everything or limit the type of data they can see. If I want you to see only one report and the other guy to see another report, I can't do it. There should be a better way to manage permissions and users. It should also support external users much better."
"One area for improvement in Microsoft Power BI is serviceability. Compared to one of its competitors: Tableau, there are a lot of things which you cannot do in this tool, that can be done in Tableau."
"I would like for the next release to have better desktop performance, especially for big databases. Additionally, I would like to have more integrations with programs like Salesforce in order to get more live data coming in."
"My main complaint is that the error messages need to be made more clear. Currently, they are either too generic or outright misleading, and finding the real problem is like searching for a needle in a haystack."
"If I compare it to Tableau, I'd say the visualizations can be better. We should have multiple options. By that I mean, while there are multiple options for the visualization, the look and feel of the dashboard when you compare to Tableau is on the lower side. Tableau has a much better visualization."
"There needs to be improved guidance and documentation for the initial setup of Power BI as it currently remains complex."
"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."
"They can provide a user-friendly and easy way to use this tool for people who don't know about programming or technical things. It will be quite good if they can improve the look and feel and make it simpler to operate. They can make it easier to create some of the reports. They can also include predefined templates that you can directly use."
"It needs row-level security, column-level security, on attributes. I want to be able to handle full-scale security model from the semantic layer, flat out."
"Needs more visual essence and connectors for the ecosystems, which would be easy to use."
"We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time."
"We're starting to open it up to more and more people to give them the ability and start looking at these things themselves, but it's not the most intuitive system, Enterprise Manager that is, so it's tough. We're trying to bridge the gap between usability and who we let in the system, because you're not going to come in and just pick it up."
"Currently, the client view looks completely different depending on what you are building."
"Enterprise Manager should be a little bit less quirky when you build out-of-the-box customization reports for it."
"Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents."
"We have the mobile server. We have not used it. That is because the people on our team have not been trained on it yet, but that is something that we want to do."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 155 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while MicroStrategy is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and SAS Visual Analytics, whereas MicroStrategy is most compared with Tableau, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE. See our MicroStrategy vs. Microsoft Power BI report.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.