MicroStrategy vs ibi

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs ibi 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.

ibi Software Tool

Product Basics

MicroStrategy is a data visualization and reporting platform that deploys on-premise and on the web. The cloud version runs on AWS or Microsoft Azure. MicroStrategy Library is the web edition, while Workstation is the desktop version.

It reigns supreme as the top analytics tool in our product directory and provides 91% of the required features out of the box. Regarding source data integration, it leaves very little to chance, winning our best-in-class award for connectivity. With over 200 connectors, there’s a high chance it’ll satisfy your data needs.

If not, you can build one using a software development kit. SDKs are also the force behind REST and embedding APIs, HyperIntelligence and data visualization. Plus, the semantic layer enables automating data prep and analysis and generating visualizations on cue.

Dossiers in MicroStrategy are like books; they have chapters further divided into pages, and each page has one or more visualizations. Every view is free-form — you can move charts around and organize them as you like. With write-back capability, you can update underlying databases from visualizations.

The vendor launched its unified cloud AI analytics platform, MicroStrategy One, with GPT-4o in September 2024. It’s twice as fast, digging into the selected data to produce dashboard summaries and answer user queries in seconds. Update 12 has auditing capabilities and shows details of active licenses, including their compliance status.

Its heart and soul is an Intelligence Server that manages metadata and processes queries. A mobile app is available. There’s a 30-day trial, but access to group permissions, KPIs and subscriptions requires a paid upgrade.

User reviews mentioned that the solution was effective, but the ecosystem and pricing were complex.

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Ibi by Information Builders offers cloud-based data and analytics platforms that empower users to turn their information into insights through robust visualization, reporting and data management. WebFOCUS is its primary offering. Flexible, configurable and scalable, it integrates data from many sources, simplifies data workflows and enables fast, easy organization and analysis of data. It allows users to make more confident data-driven decisions that drive business results.

As of 2020, the vendor has announced that it will be acquired by TIBCO.
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

Our analysts ranked it best-in-class for the following attributes.
  • Visualize Metrics: Various chart types, templates and customization are standard fare in modern data tools, and MicroStrategy is no different. What’s notable is seamless map integration while staying performant. It gets our best-in-class award and a 100 score for versatility in visualization.
  • Share Insights: Conditional formatting, templates, custom reports, scheduling and bookmarks—MicroStrategy ticks all the boxes, and we give it a 100 and the top product award for reporting. It supports report versioning, leaving Qlik and Oracle Analytics behind in this regard.
  • Secure Data: The vendor provides the entire gamut of security features—role-based views, audit logs, row and column-level security, encryption, MFA, and SSO — making it the best-in-class tool in its category. We give it a 100 score, at par with Qlik, Oracle and Domo.
  • Stay Connected 24/7: It also gets top honors and a 100 score for mobile data access, beating leading products like Tableau and Oracle. With MicroStrategy technology, anyone can deploy mobile apps with custom workflows, branding and multifactor security authentication. Barcode scanning is available for retail businesses and app vendors.
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  • Improve Data Literacy: Make data accessible to all, turning everyone into a decision-maker with a holistic overview of data. View the business as a whole through a comprehensive analytics dashboard, or drill down deeper to examine key components and drivers.
  • Highly Adaptable: Built for businesses of any size, it adapts to a broad range of skill levels, needs and expectations with ease. Choose from various plug-and-play options, which include industry-specific solutions.
  • Innovative Insights: Operationalize artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and advanced analytics to uncover significant discoveries hidden in enterprise data.
  • Embeddable: Enable teams or customers to efficiently make use of data through analytics embedded directly into their existing applications. 
  • Cloud-Based: Scale flexibly and stay current with updates through an all-in-one secure platform for the cloud.
  • Open Framework: Seamlessly connect to any database, data ecosystem or enterprise data source through the tool’s open, ubiquitous framework.
  • Free Trial: Try the cloud analytics platform for free for 14 days.
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  • HyperIntelligence: Learn about departments or employees by hovering over their names. To get ready information, add the HyperIntelligence extension to your Chrome instance and configure it to your MicroStrategy environment.
  • Auto Express: Shift the heavy lifting to AI bots — have them analyze your dashboards and suggest deep-dive questions, many of which you might not have thought of. Pull data from Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL Database, Databricks, Google BigQuery and Snowflake, among others.
  • Action Triggers: Update data in Salesforce CRM, trigger email campaigns in Marketo, or approve expenses in Workday from a MicroStrategy dashboard. Triggering workflows from dashboards is available in MicroStrategy One and Auto Express.
  • Intelligent Cubes Technology: Drive targeted marketing campaigns by digging deep into buyer demographics, purchase histories and engagement levels. Create an Intelligent Cube to store data in memory and reuse it for as many reports as desired.
  • Metadata Management: Organize data using a handy index that points to where everything is. It also gives contextual names to datasets so everyone uses the same terminology. Metadata management establishes data lineage by narrating its entire journey — where it started, how it was changed and which tasks use it now.
  • Role-Based Displays: Remember skimming through your course book a day before an important test? You read the important parts while you skipped the rest. If that’s what you feel when decisions are at stake, role-based views are what you need. CEOs can choose high-level overviews, while middle management might want detailed reports.
  • Free-form Subscriptions: This is a new feature that allows users to view updates as PDF or Excel files without signing in to MicroStrategy. It’s a great functionality for those who are away from their desks and for their teams in the field.
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  • Data Preparation: Connect to, join, blend and cleanse data through streamlined, automated processes. Improve data through quality indicators, data enrichment, built-in cleansing tools and more.
  • Data Integration: Integrate information from all kinds of data sources — real-time, batch, streaming, big data, social media, mainframes and more. Retrieve structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, including databases, cloud and on-premises applications, files and spreadsheets.
  • Data Management: Easily manage information with out-of-the-box components that give a more complete, holistic perspective of an organization’s data.
  • Data Governance: Instill an organization-wide trust in data that leads to better understanding overall. Establish references and standardize processes with centralized data collaboration, data lineage support and a formalized glossary of accepted terms.
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#26

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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ibi
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Advanced Analytics Augmented Analytics Data Management Data Pre-processing Data Transformation Data Visualization Embedded Analytics Capabilities Geospatial Visualizations And Analysis Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting 94 66 100 100 97 100 100 100 100 96 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 973 reviews
Great User Sentiment 420 reviews
84%
of users recommend this product

MicroStrategy has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 973 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

ibi has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 420 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
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4.2 (544)
4.4 (156)
4.3 (63)
4.5 (170)
4.2 (73)
4.3 (63)
4.2 (269)
3.2 (31)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated MicroStrategy and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall Business Intelligence Tools available today and earns best-in-class honors for Data Pre-processing, Embedded Analytics Capabilities, Geospatial Visualizations and Analysis and Mobile Capabilities.

Analysts' Pick Award
Data Pre-processing Award
Embedded Analytics Capabilities Award
Geospatial Visualizations and Analysis Award
Mobile Capabilities Award

we're gathering data

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Visualization: Users were satisfied with its powerful dashboards and personalization options for self-service analytics.
Functionality: Reviewers praised the platform for delivering on capabilities and scaling with their data needs.
Ease of Use: User reviews appreciated its reusable objects and semantic layer for automating data wrangling and visualization workflows.
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Support: All of the users who mentioned the vendor’s support praised their responsive, helpful support team and dedication to customer success.
Reporting: Around 96% of users who mentioned reporting said that this tool works well for report creation and scheduled distribution.
Data Visualization: About 90% of users who reviewed the tool for data visualization said that it excels in dashboard and chart creation.
Functionality: This is a robust, feature-rich tool with a great degree of flexibility and frequent updates, according to around 76% of users who reviewed the tool’s functionality.
Ease of Use: According to about 63% of users who reviewed the platform’s ease of use, its intuitive drop-and-drop interface simplifies data analysis and visualization.
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Cost: A majority of the users found the platform to be expensive.
Adoption: Most reviews said the platform had a steep learning curve.
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User Interface: Of the users who mentioned this solution’s UI, approximately 87% said that it looks outdated, especially compared to those of competitors.
Cost: About 83% of users who reviewed it for price said that this solution is expensive, especially when considering add-on modules.
Performance: All of the users who reviewed the platform’s performance and speed mentioned bugs, lag and crashes, among other issues.
Learning Curve: It takes some time to learn this platform, according to about 60% of users who reviewed its learning curve.
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MicroStrategy is a patchwork quilt of products on the web, desktop and mobile. There’s MicroStrategy Library where you can access published content and Auto Express for dashboarding and bot creation. Anyone with basic data skills can feed information to a bot and gain insights in seconds.You don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial, but you won’t be able to publish content to the server without a paid upgrade. As for choosing which edition to use, there’s the web and the desktop instance. Which one will suit you? Maybe both?MicroStrategy Workstation is for developers and data analysts and is more robust for manipulating data. It provides administrative control, even when offline, and helps prototype content before it goes live. Combining multiple visualizations on a single page provided me with more context for the same data.On the other hand, the Workstation version lacks the same level of natural language processing as the web version.MicroStrategy Web is for delivering content to your clients. Being online, it’s open to seamless upgrades and customization, and identity management and collaboration are built in. If you have a small organization, the web version might suffice, but you might want to consider going for both if you deal with large data volumes.Metadata mapping was immensely useful to me when designing a bot using MicroStrategy Auto Express. All I needed to do was feed it the data, and it generated a slew of questions I might want to ask.With a semantic layer, Microstrategy is among the BI tools that work best with large data warehouses. If you’ve just started in business or haven’t got large data volumes yet, you might want to consider a simpler tool.An oft-repeated sentiment in user reviews was that this motley crew of products — web, desktop and mobile — didn’t always sync. The vendor positions MicroStrategy One as a unified solution that’ll, hopefully, eliminate these annoyances.On the flip side, quite a few users said it could be clunky for inexperienced users. Also, some reviewers said it slowed on occasion. Most people said the solution was expensive and found its learning curve quite steep.In summary, MicroStrategy is worth considering, especially if you’re a medium or large-sized company looking for a web reporting tool with a user-friendly interface.

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Information Builders Inc. (ibi) offers a feature-rich business intelligence data and analytics platform that unlocks actionable insights and the power of decision-making for users throughout an organization. Rated highly for ease of use by most reviewers, it empowers self-service data discovery with a user-friendly UI that enables drag-and-drop data analysis and visualization; some users noted that this UI looks outdated, especially compared to those of competitors. The platform offers a wide range of prebuilt data visualizations that users can further customize if necessary. This platform excels at creating and designing reports, then distributing them either at-will or through the automated scheduling tool, as noted by a majority of users who reviewed reporting. Most notably, the platform has an outstanding support team — all of the users who reviewed its support expressed satisfaction with their proactive, responsive assistance, citing the vendor’s dedication to the success of their customers as notably apparent. Customers can tailor the platform to their needs, as its flexibility allows for customized solutions. Frequent updates add value over time, though some users remarked that these sometimes break features from older versions. Other performance issues noted in reviews include lags when performing complex queries, infrequent crashes, slow load times and issues when accessing the platform from specific devices or browsers. While easy to pick up and use, especially for the end-user, some reviewers said that there is a learning curve to master the many features of this tool — a few users noted that this learning curve lasted a few months for some team members in their organizations. Overall, ibi data and analytics is a worthy pick for self-service data visualization and reporting, especially in the hands of an organization willing to invest the resources and time to make it shine.

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