MicroStrategy Analytics vs. Spotfire

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

Spotfire was used to look at a large data set of an in process manufacturing step. The data visualization was set up to look at yield as a function of several inputs (chemical / equipment / operator). After only a short analysis it was immediately obvious that there was a 5% yield discrepancy based on the operator using the equipment. The operators were retrained and the yield gap was eliminated.

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

• It has the best coding integration (python, R) of any BI product
• The ability to work with very large datasets (10 mil+) is better than competitors
• Export options are more complete and have better functionality
• The data canvas is the best tool to join and transform data vs. competitors

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.

• They should have a lower price point for users to access the analyst version who don't require advanced capabilities. For example, a lower price if users just need to do some basic slicing and dicing with their data and not have to the data science functionality (ie. K-means clustering, regression modeling, classification modeling, etc.).
• Currently, you can't change the font type/color on the axis, which I'm sure will eventually be available in the future as they have a Spotfire Ideas portal that they're fairly responsive to and act on. I guess at the end of the day, it's about the data and what insights you get from it.

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

It's a very powerful tool that allows for a myriad of customizations within the analysis files themselves, particularly with the custom expression functionality. There have been some great strides with the quality of the visualization options (which were not great to begin with) and I hope to see more improvements made as the product gets updated.

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.

Basic tasks like generating meaningful information from large sets of raw data are very easy. The next step of linking to multiple live data sources and linking those tables and performing on the fly analysis of the imported data is understandably more difficult.

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

Even though, it's a rather stable and predictable tool that's also fast, it does have some bugs and inconsistencies that shut down the system. Depending on the details, it could happen as often as 2-3 times a week, especially during the development period.

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

Generally, the Spotfire client runs with very good performance. There are factors that could affect performance, but normally has to do with loading large analysis files from the library if the database is located some distance away and your global network is not optimal. Once you have your data table(s) loaded in the client application, usually the application is quite good performance-wise.

[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.

Support has been helpful with issues. Support seems to know their product and its capabilities. It would also seem that they have a good sense of the context of the problem; where we are going with this issue and what we want the end outcome to be.

Incentivized

The instructor was very in depth and provided relevant training to business users on how to create visualizations. They showed us how to alter settings and filter views, and provided resources for future questions. However, the instructor failed to cover data sources, connecting to data, etc. While it was helpful to see how users can use the data to create reports, they failed to properly instruct us on how to get the dataset in to begin with. We are still trying to figure out connections to certain databases (we have multiple different types).

Incentivized

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.

The online training is good, provides a good base of knowledge. The video demonstrations were well-done and easy to follow along. Provided exercises are good as well, but I think there could be more challenging exercises. The training has also gone up in price significantly in the last 3 years (in USD, which hurts us even more in Canada), and I'm not sure it is worth the money it now costs (it is worth how much it cost 3 years ago, but not double that.)

Incentivized

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

The original architecture I created for our implementation had only a particular set of internal business units in mind. Over the years, Spotfire gained in popularity in our company and was being utilized across many more business units. Soon, its usage went beyond what the original architectural implementation could provide. We've since learned about how the product is used by the different teams and are currently in the middle of rolling out a new architecture. I suggest:

• Have clearly defined service level agreements with all the teams that will use Spotfire. Your business intelligence group might only need availability during normal working hours, but your production support group might need 24/7 availability. If these groups share one Spotfire server, maintenance of that server might be a problem.
• Know the different types of data you will be working with. One group might be working with "public" data while another group might work with sensitive data. Design your Library accordingly and with the proper permissions.
• Know the roles of the users of Spotfire. Will there only be a small set of report writers or does everyone have write access to the Library?
• ALWAYS add a timestamp prompt to your reports. You don't want multiple users opening a report that will try and pull down millions of rows of data to their local workstations. Another option, of course, is to just hard code a time range in the backing database view (i.e. where activity_date >= sysdate - 90, etc.), but I'd rather educate/train the user base if possible.
• This probably goes without saying, but if possible, point to a separate reporting database or a logical standby database. You don't want the company pounding on your primaries and take down your order system.

[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.

Spotfire is appropriate for every organization of any size because it can be a recipient of data for better decision-making. Being a robust development platform for creating reports and dashboards, creating a new Spotfire dashboard is relatively simple. Developers can create highly customized dashboards using the tools it provides. I will recommend this software to others

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

In an enterprise architecture, if Spotfire Advanced Data services(Composite Studio),data marts can be managed optimally and scalability in a data perspective is great. As the web player/consumer is directly proportional to RAM, if the enterprise can handle RAM requirement accomodating fail over mechanisms appropraitely, it is definitely scalable,

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.

• Spotfire really helped a lot of people in terms of analysis. It eliminates data analysis in excel. Because even underlying data you can explore it in Spotfire.
• Spotfire helps data analysts to investigate data and also help analysts solve inconsistency of data.
• Spotfire helps data analysts in building great dashboard that provide insights to users to make decisions to drive revenue and manage the churn.

Incentivized