MicroStrategy Analytics vs. QlikView

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

Incentivized

Sales data validations have helped manage our justifications in the past, especially with regard to new product development and new business introduction. It has also been helpful in identifying trends with business impact and direction specific to quarter and monthly sales from ERP data as well as decisions to purchase equipment of staffing based on run rates and product demand.

One thing that can get out of hand is data output - if you aren't careful in your query, you may be overloaded with data dumps and drown in the amount of info you have to filter through. This is a user caution, not a comment on the software itself.

Incentivized

• I think the dashboards are quite helpful to visualize on the spot data.
• Creation of facts and attributes is simple - I have no programming experience and was still able to create and modify these items.
• Scheduling reports to be run on a daily, weekly, or hourly basis is simple. It provides updated data on a timed basis with no need to go back into the program.

Incentivized

• QlikView has a simple, relational data model that's REALLY fast. Filtering and changing data is dead simple results are almost immediately available.
• The free version of Qlikview is almost completely featured, so you roll a pro-level product out to an entire department for really cheap.
• QlikView is really flexible--if you can imagine it, you can build it.

Incentivized

• Visual Insight have multiple limitations. Few of them are listed here - i)Cannot change default graph colors ii) text/graph formatting are very very limited iii)Add metric to Color by / Thresholds is not possible iv)one of the worst limitation of the VI in older versions is that it is not possible to create filters that apply only to a specific visualization. For example if there are 4 graphs in one dashboard & if you have filters then those filters would be applicable for all of them
• Some formatting options are not there either on Web or Developer especially while dealing with a document. We have to use both Web & Developer to solve issues.
• While connecting with MDX cube reporting loses a lot of features.

• We found that QlikView can be a bit slow in supporting some forms of encryption. It is web-based and we needed to upgrade all of our server to not support the older SSL and TLS 1 protocols, only support TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. However, QlikView could not run with TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. We had to wait over six months to get a version that would handle the newer TLS versions.
• There are so many options with QlikView that you can get lost when developing a visualization. There are still items I have not yet figured out, such as labeling a graph with the name of a selected detail item.
• QlikView works by pulling the data it is going to use for visualization into its database. I am a security reviewer and I need to make certain that PII and PHI is not pulled by QlikView for a visualization, otherwise this could become a reportable indecent.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Ease of use, ability to load from pretty much any data source. today I created an application that loaded time sheets from excel that are not in a table format. With Qlik's "enable transformation steps" I was able to automate loads of multiple spreadsheets and multiple tabs easily. Could not do that with any other tool.

Incentivized

Overall for most functions it is incredibly easy to use and understand - however more complicated features are very technical and require training skill. There is the possibility of creating reports that return inaccurate information if you do not have a solid understanding of the information.

I do think there is a steep learning curve to the program and that it requires a high level of experience or a data scientist background to fully take advantage and implement dashboards, and users will require ongoing training to maximize ROI, but it is absolutely worth it considering the impact it can make on an organization.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

QlikView server is very stable, with minimal errors and rare outages.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The scripting option gives me options to connect to different databases with ease

Incentivized

[I feel as if] they answer the phone quickly, but can't answer any of your questions. Will get lost in a support ticketing system. Better off finding third-party online forums of MicroStrategy Analytics users huddled together trying to help each other do the most basic things.

The documentation presented by QlikView is very clear and exact. This makes the process of implementation more easy. If any questions arise while creating the reports it is very easy to access the QlikView documents through the internet. QlikView also has a Qlik Community, full of different questions and answers. This helps a lot to resolve issues even without contacting the support team.

Incentivized

My team attended, but I cannot myself rate, but I think it was good as they've successfully launched a training program at our company themselves for users. It was 3-4 day training.

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.

Training was as expected. The demo environments tend to be more fully featured that our own environment, but the training was clear and well delivered.

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

Incentivized

It has taken some time to get used to Qlikview and the backend team behind it. From understanding the new regulations on using less images and also pushing for more tools (such as full compatibility on desktop, laptop, ipad, phone). We were given training on this and have helpful tips to find analytics behind Qlikview but it is very much also a learn as you implement system.

Incentivized

[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 ultimately turned out to be higher cost when we had to start adding modules and pay for professional services to do even the most basic reporting Google Charts - Not as fare comparison since this is a free SaaS product, but when we couldn't get things working with MicroStrategy Analytics, we starting using Charts just to get data out the door for the company. Amazing how easy it is, and free. Provides WAY more robust capabilities in your web browser for free.

With QlikView and Qlik Sense the users can answer their own questions more interactively. They also can build their own visualizations without waiting [for] someone from IT to create a new report. The users can navigate through the data finding out relevant information. Through QlikView color code, users can get aware of the relationship between the different data points.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Speed to market is the really big thing. You can attach to multiple data sources quickly and build a consumable model for a dashboard. It doesn’t require IT talent to build. We have built more dashboards and added more users in the last year, then in our entire history. I was at a company of 30k+ employees before, and we didn't have near this level of BI adoption.
• As a result, we are seeing benefits across business function. For example, within sales, our pipeline has much more visibility. It allows for much faster decisions on things like quotas. One of our biggest power users is in sales ops. She feels her dashboards load 10x faster than our previous tool and she can make changes on the fly.