RStudio vs MicroStrategy

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Our analysts compared RStudio vs MicroStrategy 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

RStudio is an integrated development environment suite for the R programming language, synthesizing coding tools into one software tool for easier advanced data processing. Using in-memory processing, it is capable of parsing big data through integrations and connections.

It is available in both open-source and commercial formats, with extra features available in the paid edition includes more sophisticated collaboration and security efforts. The free version is capable of end-to-end analytics, from API connectivity and data ingestion to visualization creation and distribution. It can be deployed standalone or on a web browser through connection to RStudio Server.
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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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Product Insights

  • Open-Source or Commercial: Create visualizations and reports from data analysis scripts with the open-source version. Access more advanced features, including deeper security and support with the paid version.
  • Streamlined R Programming: Execute code directly from the source editor by integrating the tools being used into one interface. Supports Git and Subversion for more advanced code writing needs.  
  • Advanced Data Analysis: Investigate trends on a big data scale via integrations for distributed processing, data modeling and predictive analysis. Develop deep analytical insights through R, the premier statistics coding language. 
  • Proprietary R Packages: Get sophisticated ready-to-install R packages comparable with machine learning frameworks to ingest, store, analyze and consume data.  
  • Data Visualization: Easily digest analyzed data through out-of-the-box and integrated visualizations and data consumption deployment vessels using Shiny and ggvis. Create interactive dashboards and charts with drill-down capabilities. 
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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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  • Source Editor: Develop programs in a single console window by synthesizing and integrating all tools in use. Highlight syntax, define functions and complete code in the console.  
  • Web Applications: Publish applications, dashboards and documents to the web with the internally-developed Shiny Server R package. 
  • Flexdashboard: Develop interactive dashboards with JavaScript visualizations, with support for HTML widgets, with this R package. 
  • Launcher: Launch R and Python processes remotely or submit R scripts to compute clusters like SLURM or Kubernetes. 
  • REST API Creation: Develop web API connections with the plumber R package — with as little as a single line of code. 
  • Spark Integration: Integrate seamlessly with Apache Spark to achieve big data analytics through distributed processing and leverage its machine learning capabilities to run more advanced queries.  
  • RStudio Connect: Publish statistical data analyses in the form of visually impactful visualizations, synthesizing all the aforementioned publishing features into one interface.  
  • Data Modeling and Prediction: Powers predictive and prescriptive analytics via connectivity to TensorFlow. Improves the product’s own data modeling capabilities via Tidymodels R package. 
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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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Product Ranking

#20

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

we're gathering data
90
we're gathering data
94
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66
we're gathering data
100
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

RStudio
MicroStrategy
+ 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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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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100%
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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we're gathering data
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92%
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8%
we're gathering data
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100%
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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 700 reviews
Great User Sentiment 973 reviews
90%
of users recommend this product

RStudio has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 90% when considering 700 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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.

5.0 (12)
4.9 (24)
4.5 (485)
4.2 (544)
n/a
4.3 (63)
4.6 (89)
n/a
4.4 (43)
4.2 (73)
4.4 (71)
4.2 (269)

Awards

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

User Favorite Award

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

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data analysis: Around 96% of users who reviewed data analysis said that the platform had strong machine learning and data analysis capabilities.
Functionality: Approximately 86% of users who mentioned functionality said that the tool had a wide range of powerful features for efficient data visualization and analysis.
Ease of Use: The interface was user-friendly and easily navigable, according to 74% of users who reviewed this feature.
Cost: About 93% of users who mentioned pricing said that the open source version of the platform was a definite plus.
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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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Performance: The tool used up a lot of memory and slowed down when processing large amounts of data, around 88% of users who mentioned its performance said.
Steep Learning Curve: Approximately 73% of users said that it was challenging to work with the platform without previous knowledge of R and that the syntax was difficult to learn.
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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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RStudio is a powerful web- and cloud-based BI platform with excellent statistical analysis and data science capabilities. Integrating with cloud computing technologies, the platform has good machine learning capabilities to power data analysis by providing a wide range of features for data recovery, presentation and interpretation. It provides rich built-in visualization libraries with pre-set charts and functions that drastically reduce the need to code. Many users who reviewed its UI said that the interface was user-friendly and easy to navigate, though some users said that it looked dated and could do with an upgrade. Quite a few users who reviewed the platform for data analysis said that it was easy to run statistical and regression tests with minimal coding, and coupled with an open-source server, this platform served their data needs well. On the flip side, many users who reviewed the tool for performance said that it consumes a lot of memory and lags behind its competitors in speed. Quite a lot of users mentioned that the platform could be buggy at times and was prone to crashes, possibly because some libraries were not optimized for performance with large datasets. Many users found it confusing to access the open-source version, especially since separate versions of the platform work differently with some library packages. Some users complained that the code run, once started, could not be stopped and the stop button on the interface didn’t work. A majority of users who reviewed the learning curve as a feature said that the help section was difficult to understand and previous knowledge of R was required to leverage the tool to its fullest. In summary, RStudio is a versatile and extensible BI tool powered by machine learning and is capable of insightful statistical data analysis and forecasting capabilities.

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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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