MicroStrategy vs Orbit Analytics

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Orbit Analytics 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

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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Orbit, which stands for Operational Reporting and Business Intelligence Technology, provides self-service advanced analytics to businesses for on-demand, data-driven decision-making. It pulls data from a wide range of sources, including Microsoft Excel, and enables high-performance data analysis through visualization and reporting. Connecting to more than 200 business applications, it ensures data integrity and security compliance across platforms.

Leveraging R for statistical computing, it empowers businesses to make accurate and timely business decisions.
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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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  • Improved Business Decisions: Drive innovation, boost efficiencies and increase revenue through better-informed business decisions. Identify opportunities and spot data trends by surfacing accurate and updated information. Analyze past insights to uncover previously undiscovered data relationships and define future strategy. 
  • Data Integration: Connects out-of-the-box to more than 200 applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, MS-Excel, PeopleSoft, Microsoft Office, Taleo, Salesforce and more. Breaks down data silos to aggregate information from a multitude of disparate data sources. Pulls data from cloud-based, on-premise and hybrid databases. 
  • Advanced Analytics: Forecast business trends by using what-if analyses, scenario modeling and decision trees. Discover patterns, relationships and outliers in data to make informed decisions. Pull data from disparate sources for multidimensional predictive analysis through crosstabs and other visualization types. 
  • Ad-Hoc Reporting: Get answers to data questions faster through its intelligent query generator. Gain in-depth, real-time data insights through easy drag-and-drop, filtering and slice-and-dice actions. Add visual context to reporting insights with geospatial data relationships and plan ahead. 
  • Tell Data Stories: Create visually compelling, interactive data visualizations from proprietary information, unifying disparate data sets into one single dashboard. Display complex information through simple visuals like charts, maps and graphs and easily digestible dashboard summaries. Share visualizations with others by embedding into business applications and exporting to PDFs. 
  • Cloud BI: Reduce the cost of ownership through a flexible cloud solution that combines enterprise-class analytics with an autonomous data warehouse. Integrates with existing on-premise and cloud-based data sources to deliver real-time reporting and analytics. 
  • Data Security: Secures data through built-in row and column-level access permissions based on roles. Automatically syncs with business applications and aligns with pre-existing security rules, account profiles and team member roles. 
  • Deploy Anywhere: Deploys on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid solutions. 
  • Mobility: View and share mobile-optimized dashboards and reports on the go. Create custom reports, or build from more than 1,000 pre-built templates to share business insights with others. Click on dashboard objects like charts and graphs to drill down into proprietary data for deeper insight. 
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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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  • Reporting: Create reports from more than 1,000 pre-built reporting templates or build custom ones. Aggregate data from multiple sources and combine it into pixel-perfect reports. Create document templates within Word and Excel, and then add data and publish in Excel, HTML or PDF formats for sharing. 
  • Integrate with Excel: Upload data as Excel files to perform ad-hoc data analysis through easy drag-and-drop actions. Filter specific data fields or slice and dice to view pertinent business metrics. Or, pull live data directly into Excel from one or more business applications and run multiple reports at the same time. 
  • Data Modeling: Build models through associative querying and aggregation of multi-dimensional data through Star Schema and Snowflake queries. Get data insights from OLAP cubes and third-party data sources with customizable options for deeper analysis. 
  • Metadata Management: Customize, reuse, capture and publish data dimensions, hierarchies, performance metrics, KPIs and report layout parameters. Store key metadata objects separately from application databases, enabling faster retrieval, when needed. 
  • Integration with Python and R: Create analytical models from live data by using R and Python. The R Statistics and Python libraries are embedded within its BI server. 
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#373

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

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94
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100
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

MicroStrategy
Orbit Analytics
+ Add Product + Add Product
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
Excellent User Sentiment 4 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.

95%
of users recommend this product

Orbit Analytics has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 95% when considering 4 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
n/a
4.2 (544)
4.8 (3)
4.3 (63)
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4.2 (73)
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4.2 (269)
4.5 (1)

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

Orbit Analytics stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

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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Free to Use: Orbit is free for everyone to use, which makes it a great option for businesses of all sizes.
Easy to Set Up: Orbit is easy to set up and use, even for users who are not familiar with web analytics. Users have praised the platform for its intuitive design and straightforward implementation process.
Comprehensive Data: Orbit provides a comprehensive view of website traffic, including page views, unique visitors, bounce rate, and more. This data can be used to track website performance and identify areas for improvement.
Customizable Reports: Orbit allows users to create custom reports to track the specific metrics that are most important to them. This flexibility is highly valued by users who need tailored insights.
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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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Sampling Issues: For high-traffic websites, Orbit Analytics may extrapolate data based on a subset, leading to potential inaccuracies in metrics like bounce rate or session duration.
Limited Real-Time Reporting: Orbit Analytics doesn't offer truly real-time data updates, making it less suitable for situations demanding immediate insights, such as monitoring the impact of a flash sale.
Complex Interface: Some users find the interface overwhelming, especially those new to web analytics or accustomed to more user-friendly tools.
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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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Is Orbit Analytics the business intelligence software that will make your insights truly out of this world? Users praise Orbit Analytics for its user-friendly interface, making it easy for even non-techy folks to grasp. They also dig its robust reporting features, which help them whip up insightful reports that actually make sense. One user raved about how Orbit Analytics helped them wrangle a massive dataset into a clear and concise report that impressed higher-ups. However, some users find its predictive analytics capabilities a bit lacking compared to competitors like Tableau or Power BI. They wish it had more advanced forecasting tools to get a better handle on future trends. Overall, Orbit Analytics seems like a good fit for businesses who need a straightforward, user-friendly platform to analyze their data and create reports. If you're looking for cutting-edge predictive analytics, you might want to explore other options.

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