Power BI vs MicroStrategy
Last Updated:Our analysts compared Power BI against MicroStrategy based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.
Product Basics
Product Insights
- Live 360-Degree View of Data: Stay in the loop about crucial business insights. Power BI's dashboards update in real time from all data sources.
- Visualize Data Trends: Create intuitive visualizations to present data after it is parsed, structured and analyzed. This can be in the form of graphs, charts, maps or other graphic depictions that make interpreting data quicker, easier and more impactful.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Put the data visualizations to work — analyze not only what happened, but also why, how and where. Use data to improve business processes and customer interactions, adjust business plans and make forecasts.
- Ease of Use: Encourages user adoption towards a data driven culture. Power BI simplifies self-service BI with built-in features similar to Excel and other Microsoft technologies — feel right at home with functionalities like drag-and-drop design, resizing and copy-and-paste.
- Collaborate Across Organization: Share reports and collaborate on decisions quickly; save time otherwise spent on inefficient meetings or jumping from one platform to another. Integrates seamlessly with many commonly used business tools to promote teamwork throughout departments.
- On-the-Go Access: Access visual analytics on the go with Power BI. Stay connected to and share insights from any device, with mobile-optimized reports and a mobile app.
- Secure Insights: As one of the largest, most well-known names in the software industry, Microsoft backs up their reputation with security and protection for businesses’ sensitive information in Power BI. Visit the Trust Center to learn more about exactly how all of Microsoft’s solutions — including Power BI — meet industry security standards and ensure regulatory compliance. Keeps information secure from the original data source all the way up through the report sharing and collaboration features.
- Free Version: Power BI goes beyond a free trial with a perpetually free Desktop version, suitable for creating reports and data visualizations on an individual basis.
- Scalability and Affordability: Power BI can scale from the individual to the enterprise level as a whole, while only paying for exactly what’s necessary — choose the right option from versions varying in capabilities and pricing.
- Maximize Business Insights: Get a clearer picture of your data, revealing efficiencies — and deficiencies. Connect to and blend data from all your sources, leveraging machine learning capabilities, so that you can make key decisions with confidence.
- Speed and Performance: Accelerate response times on data queries and increase productivity. Improve performance at a database level, as the platform optimizes resource usage and limits demanding tasks.
- User-Friendly: Easily peruse and navigate through insights via a streamlined and familiar interface accessible to users of all skill levels.
- Seamless Integration: Integrate into a data ecosystem that has been developed organically, so that every piece works with others seamlessly from end-to-end with a unified architecture that also integrates with leading technology systems and open-source tools.
- Improve Communication: Collaborate on insights, discuss data points and generate and share with others. Increase user adoption and encourage a more intelligent enterprise.
- Enterprise Mobility: Do more than just access reports on-the-go — build information-rich mobile apps and put BI in the hands of a mobilized workforce.
- Scalability: Handle massive datasets without limitations and rapidly scale deployment, whether supporting a small team of users or an enterprise with thousands of employees.
- Quick Deployment: Select the deployment solution that best matches your needs: commercial or private cloud, on-premises or hybrid deployment. With pre-configured provisioning consoles for Azure and AWS, launch the platform in minutes with minimal effort.
- Free Trial: Sign up for MicroStrategy’s free 30-day full platform trial.
- Data Source Connectivity: Draw data from hundreds of supported sources both on-premises and cloud-based, including web APIs, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Excel, Google Analytics, JSON and text/CSV files, Oracle, SQL and more.
- Data Preparation: A self-service Power Query process ingests, transforms, integrates and enriches data while preparing it for analysis in Power BI. Organize unstructured data into interpretable data sets to highlight trends. Approach analysis from different angles with intuitive filters and data manipulation features.
- Data Visualization: Power BI creates a range of visualizations from data that conceptualize trends and patterns. These can be a range of different graphics including bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, scattergrams, maps, etc. Power BI transforms abstract concepts and hard numbers into easy-to-interpret charts.
- Pre-Built or Custom Dashboards/Reports: Choose from a range of pre-built templates optimized for most industries to generate visualizations of KPIs in seconds. Or, if out-of-the-box reports don’t cut it, design customized data stories with a drag-and-drop canvas and hundreds of interactive visualization options in Power BI.
- Natural Language Processing: Explore data through conversational language with the built-in Q&A tool; find meaningful answers to data-related questions.
- Secure Data Governance: Prevent data loss with role-specific data protection and row-level security. Safeguards data so that Power BI meets industry-level compliance standards and certifications. Allows administrators to centralize data governance, security and management across the organization.
- Collaboration: Power BI fosters collaboration through a data-driven culture of business intelligence with features like team commenting, alerts and content subscriptions. Publish and share permissions-adjustable reports and dashboards, both internally and externally.
- Mobile Compatibility: All reports in Power BI are optimized for mobile and can be published to the cloud or on-premises, or embedded into existing apps or websites. Receive personal data alerts, quickly view and share insights and stay in the know from any mobile device on Android or iOS, or any PC or tablet or phone with access to the Windows Store.
- Embedded Analytics: Brand and customize custom analytics offerings for end-users with white label capabilities and a plethora of visualization options. Develop and test custom modules to embed Power BI's analytics capabilities into other applications.
- Seamless Integration: Power BI seamlessly integrates with everything in the Microsoft Office 365 Suite, as well as a range of other software and BI solutions. This includes third-party data sources like Spark, Google Analytics and more.
- On-Premises or Cloud Server: As part of the Premium plan, Power BI's Report Server provides a hybrid, comprehensive solution by building a BI environment on-premises, keeping it safe behind the intranet firewall. Allows the flexibility to move the server to the cloud as per requirements, protecting the business’ investment and data for the future.
- Data Connectivity: Connect to over a hundred databases, including enterprise directories, data warehouses, cloud databases, physical access systems, information assets and more through out-of-the-box gateways and drivers. Pull data from web-based reports and queries from other BI systems as well as ERP, CRM or web applications. Extend access to even more third-party sources with a software development kit that can allow users to build custom data connectors that integrate with R advanced analytics, Python, JavaScript, D3, GIS providers and more.
- Data Preparation: Wrangle and parse data in a process that automatically recommends, profiles and transforms data without needing to export it to a spreadsheet. Save data transformations for repeatable data preparation workflows.
- Federated Analytics: Leverage existing investments in trusted data sources like Tableau, Qlik and Power BI, blend information from multiple systems and build reports and insights without giving up any self-service BI solutions. Supercharge Excel sheets to analyze spreadsheets from within the interface.
- Enterprise Semantic Graph: Establish an index of all data assets that integrates and embeds everywhere, enriching data silos with location intelligence and real-time telemetry, enabling greater organization-wide data visibility and integrity.
- Data Visualization: Deploy data visualizations through branded, interactive user experiences, with customizable, user-friendly dossiers and dashboards, data discovery and personalized reports. Quickly build meaningful dashboards through prebuilt grids, graphs, charts and map templates combined with advanced user controls and third-party integrations.
- Big Data: Leverage existing big data investments through MicroStrategy’s open cloud architecture, including sources like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as SQL, MDX, NoSQL and Hadoop technologies. Operationalize data lakes with the power of analytics, resulting in greater flexibility and greater visibility into your organization’s insights as a whole.
- HyperIntelligence: Let relevant and contextual insights find you right where you look — you don’t have to go looking for them. Find smarter answers to your questions in a flash, via zero-click extensions that integrate with websites, applications, Excel, email inboxes, Slack and more.
- Machine Learning: Drive intelligent, automated data discovery with advanced and predictive analytics powered by machine learning. Maximize the value of your data with AI-driven recommendations, voice-enabled assistant integration, natural language processing and more.
- Collaboration: Ask questions, ping colleagues with notifications in discussion threads, highlight patterns or call attention to specific data points by commenting directly within the UI. Share direct links via email, chat or directly invite others to a personalized view of a dossier.
- Personalization: Apply slice-and-dice filters to a dossier to find answers, then share that personalized view with others. Schedule and automate delivery of personalized reports across their enterprise through user preferences and security roles, ensuring that users see only the data relevant to them.
- Real-Time Alerts: Receive in-app, browser and mobile notifications that keep you up-to-date on KPIs, with native push notification functionality on the mobile app.
- Embedded Analytics: Extend the reach of their analytics with embedded analytical functionality in browsers and applications. Integrate into custom offerings with branding and white label tools. Enhance MicroStrategy with third-party capabilities.
- Digital Credentials: Ditch security vulnerabilities through plastic ID cards, passwords and tokens — digitize and modernize enterprise authentication with mobile role-based identity badges tied to users’ smartphones.
- Web and Mobile Apps: Access data from anywhere with an internet connection through cross-compatible mobile, web and desktop apps. Build, test and deploy your own apps that accelerate workflows.
Product Ranking
#2
among all
Business Intelligence Tools
#15
among all
Business Intelligence Tools
Analyst Rating Summary
Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data
Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data
User Sentiment Summary
4795 reviews
929 reviews
Power BI has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 4795 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.
MicroStrategy has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 929 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.
Awards
Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
Microsoft Power BI is no doubt a powerful business intelligence platform, from one of the leaders in the technology field, with some users even saying that its potential seems to be limitless due to its extensibility and scalability. Power BI has resounding success with its intuitive interface, robust data visualization capabilities and interactive features that make analytics accessible to all users. Power users say that its support for DAX, R, Python and other query languages give them access to even more complex calculations, data querying, data preparation and data modeling, making Power BI a strong solution for technical and non-technical users alike. However, many customers say that while Power BI may have a user-friendly GUI, it’s not necessarily a user-friendly system, with many users saying that they required heavy training or preexisting knowledge to really understand how to work with the system. While many users cite its seamless Microsoft and Windows integration as a pro, especially for those companies that have already invested in Microsoft-based solutions, others say that Power BI’s incompatibility with non-Windows systems and weaker integrations with non-Microsoft solutions are a point of frustration for them. The cloud-based platform offers responsive mobile and web access to dashboards, but several users note that browser functionality is limited. Power BI reviews seemed to be mixed as to Power BI's sharing capabilities, with about 65% of users satisfied that Power BI helps them in making presentations and catering to different audiences, with the other approximately 35% expressing dissatisfaction with its limited display and export options, as well as restrictions on non-subscribers not being able to view dashboards. Another pain point for Power BI seems to be its operating speed, particularly when working with large datasets. In summary, Microsoft Power BI is a strong contender in the business intelligence field, earning mostly positive reviews for its boost to productivity and efficiency, and an especially good choice for customers already using Microsoft technologies like Excel, but may be difficult for new users to adopt.
MicroStrategy is a strong contender in the enterprise BI market that its customers praise for a multitude of reasons: its robust drag-and-drop reporting tool, strong data visualizations and dashboards and accessibility through web and mobile apps. Overall, more than 87.5% of users said that the platform is easy to use, with a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface that eliminates the need for coding in SQL. However, the solution is not without its drawbacks, most notably a time-consuming implementation process. It also struggles with performance issues, with its reliance on powerful hardware often leading to slow-downs. All of the users for whom the price was an issue said that the solution is expensive, though some of these users said that it offered great value and that prospective buyers shouldn’t shy away from costs. Finally, when it comes to learning how to use the tool, around 80% of users found its learning curve quite steep, and available resources lacking. Some users note that the free online classes were nice, but offered more refresher information than useful, new information, and that the available education and documentation isn’t comprehensive or up-to-date. While the front-end is user-friendly, many users note that the back-end developer mode has an even steeper learning curve and is quite difficult to navigate. In summary, MicroStrategy is a BI solution certainly worth consideration, especially for companies looking for a web-based tool with strong reporting capabilities and a user-friendly interface.
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