MicroStrategy vs NVivo

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs NVivo 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.

NVivo 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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NVivo is a qualitative data analysis solution for academic and industrial research. It lets users code and visualize their findings from interviews, surveys, text documents and demographic information. It’s helpful in social sciences, education and healthcare.

It has a friendly interface, powerful searches and advanced graphics. Once set up, the system can perform automatic sentiment analysis. Users can record the coding schemes and use them across the data. Documenting the steps enables future researchers to validate the research.

The vendor offers exclusive modules for collaboration and transcription. Its Collaboration Cloud lets many people work on the same project.

Pros
  • Powerful data management
  • Rich coding and query tools
  • Visualizations and data exploration
  • Team collaboration features
  • Support for various data formats
Cons
  • Steep learning curve
  • Can be expensive for individuals
  • Limited free trial/demo
  • Not ideal for simple projects
  • Occasional bugs and glitches
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$25/User, Monthly, Quote-based
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Product Assistance

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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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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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  • Boost ROI: Tap into buyer sentiment by noting their needs and preferences and applying them to product development. Push sales by fine-tuning marketing campaigns.
  • Innovate: Launch new products and improve existing offerings. Go beyond numbers and discover what customers think and feel with thematic and sentiment analysis.
  • Act: Save time while searching for information. Organize data from various sources, such as interviews, surveys and social media, in one system.
  • Improve Services: Build stronger customer associations by serving them better. Identify their pain points and improvement areas by analyzing feedback.
  • Save Money: Free resources for more strategic work by automating tasks like transcription — auto-code interviews with NVivo 14.
  • Test Drive: Try it for 14 days free, including the Collaboration Cloud.
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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 Import: Pull data from mobile apps like Evernote and organize it using folders, sets or file classifications. It supports transcripts, articles, audio/video recordings and social media content.
  • Qualitative Analysis: Uncover hidden insights using powerful search tools. It turns interviews, surveys and documents into charts, word clouds and maps.
  • Thematic Analysis: Understand findings after digging deep into gathered data and spot emerging themes.
  • Integrations: Combine research materials in one place. Allows direct imports from Microsoft Office. Plus, it can use data from SurveyMonkey and social media platforms.
  • Sharing and Publishing: Export results, models and charts to various formats, including Excel, Word, text, rich-text and PDF files. Use the system clipboard to copy and paste graphics into reports and presentations.
  • Transcription: Review and edit transcripts, tag speakers, and add notes, then import transcripts directly into NVivo for analysis. NVivo Transcription auto-transcribes uploaded audio files, with support for 28 languages.
  • Multilingual Options: Analyze data in Chinese, Japanese, English, French, German and Portuguese, among other languages.
  • Collaboration Cloud: Work together to co-author research projects. A user uploads a master project to a secure cloud workspace, enabling others to download and work on it offline and then seamlessly merge their edits back into the main project.
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#42

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

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100
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

MicroStrategy
NVivo
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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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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 973 reviews
Great User Sentiment 179 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.

82%
of users recommend this product

NVivo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 179 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
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4.2 (544)
4.1 (133)
4.3 (63)
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4.1 (46)
4.2 (73)
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4.2 (269)
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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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Data Management: Organize and store various data types (text, audio, video, images) in one secure location.
Flexible Coding: Employ diverse coding approaches (tree, auto and query) to categorize and analyze data based on research questions.
Relationship Exploration: Uncover connections and hierarchies between codes using visual network maps and relationship coding.
Advanced Querying: Search coded data for specific terms, patterns or code combinations to identify key themes and trends.
Visualizations: Generate various visualizations (word clouds and concept maps) to present complex data findings clearly.
Collaboration: Share and collaborate on projects with other researchers using cloud-based options or file exports (depending on the version).
Support & Resources: Benefit from extensive online resources, tutorials, and user communities for troubleshooting and learning best practices.
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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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Steep Learning Curve: New users often report difficulty in mastering NVivo's features quickly, which impacts their productivity and project timelines.
High Cost: Some users find NVivo's pricing to be prohibitive, particularly those from smaller institutions or independent researchers with limited budgets.
Limited Cross-Platform Support: NVivo's limited compatibility with non-Windows operating systems can be a barrier for Mac or Linux users, who may have to seek alternatives or use virtual machines.
Resource Intensiveness: NVivo can be demanding on computer resources, leading to performance issues on less powerful machines, which can frustrate users when handling large data sets.
Occasional Software Bugs: Users occasionally encounter bugs that can disrupt workflow and require waiting for patches or updates, affecting the software’s dependability.
Rigid Licensing Policy: NVivo's licenses can be inflexible, and transferring a license to another computer can be problematic, causing inconvenience to users who need mobility.
Complex Data Importation: Some users find importing data from various sources into NVivo cumbersome, which could lead to a time-consuming setup process.
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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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NVivo is qualitative data analysis software that received positive reviews from users. They appreciate its user-friendly interface, powerful features and ability to handle large datasets.However, some users complained about lax customer support and the occasional bug.NVivo is popular but not as robust as some of the other options. It’s also expensive. However, many users believe that the extra cost is worth it for the additional features and functionality. It has robust coding features to analyze large amounts of data quickly.Overall, NVivo is a user-friendly qualitative data analysis software that can be expensive and complex for individual users but is a handy assistant for teams.

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