MicroStrategy vs Pyramid Analytics

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Pyramid 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.

Pyramid Analytics 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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Pyramid Analytics offers an enterprise-grade operating system that scales smoothly from single-user to organization-wide implementation. It’s OS agnostic and can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise.

It promotes data literacy by allowing different levels of users to utilize different capabilities. It is designed to support an organization’s decision workflow end-to-end from self-service analytics to forecasting.
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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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  • Support Strategy: Execute analytics strategies with smooth implementation, management and support. Reduces silos by making data available to the entire organization.
  • Perform Self-Service Analytics: Maximizes value and streamlines operational investments through the delivery of faster, better insights. Self-service and a transparent user experience promote data literacy.
  • Create Compelling Visualizations: Clearly communicate insights through intuitive, dynamic graphics, including charts, graphs, tables and interactive visualizations.
  • Identify and Address Business Problems: Recognizes data trends and identifies problem areas while providing suggestions for rectifying them.
  • Make Data-Driven Business Decisions: Create models to understand operational data and forecast how changes will affect the business to make more informed decisions.
  • Perform One-Click Analytics: Draw data from both traditional and big data sources through machine learning analytics to make data processing simple. Augmented guidance features help guide users to answer key business questions.
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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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  • Advanced Analytics: Run advanced queries on large datasets and perform analysis on business questions.
  • Machine Learning Models: Create data models that adapt as the software learns to “anticipate” future needs and queries.
  • Drag-and-Drop: The Business User ETL offers a drag-and-drop interface that makes cleaning and preparing data for analysis easy.
  • Ad-Hoc Reporting: Create spur-of-the-moment reports to answer specific business questions rather than formulating on a recurring schedule.
  • Graphical Data Representation: A variety of graphical visualization options to depict datasets in the most aesthetically pleasing and intuitive way. Some of these include bar graphs, pie charts, scattergrams and more.
  • Content Sharing: The publish module can create pixel-perfect reports and embed them into a range of export formats, including emails and HTML.
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Product Ranking

#15

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Business Intelligence Tools

#29

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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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 144 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.

89%
of users recommend this product

Pyramid Analytics has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 89% when considering 144 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
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4.2 (544)
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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

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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 users who mentioned support say that support teams were quick to reply and help out.
Performance: The platform can quickly make insights available to businesses, as reported by all reviewers who specified performance.
Ease of use: The system is easy to implement, deploy and integrate, according to about 83% of users who talked about ease of use.
Connectivity: About 75% of users who spoke about connectivity mentioned the solution’s ability to integrate and work with data from multiple sources.
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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: Pyramid Analytics has a huge learning curve, according to approximately 58% of users who referred to the learning curve.
Data Visualization: 60% of users who mentioned visualization say that dashboards were aesthetically unpleasant.
Functionality: Of users who talked about functionality, around 69% say that the system has stability issues.
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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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Pyramid Analytics is a flexible, scalable BI platform with machine learning capabilities. It lets users mash up data from multiple sources, model data within the application and run reports in mere minutes, as opposed to manual processes that would take hours.Its numerous features have the ability to carry out complex data analysis. Users found customer support to be helpful when demonstrating the tool’s full potential. Users also liked the ability to incorporate AI into their dashboards. However, Some users found navigating through dashboards to be difficult. Users also complained that dashboard features could be more effective. New features were sometimes unstable, introducing bugs to existing functionality. Conclusively, it is a cost-effective, intuitive solution with excellent support that can quickly deliver insights to all levels of a businesses.

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