MicroStrategy vs Bold BI

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Bold BI based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Embedded Analytics Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

MicroStrategy 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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Bold BI is an analytics platform with advanced embedded analytics. It consists of a web designer, viewer and widgets to perform operations without writing code. Leverage an interactive designer to build custom dashboards, pull metrics and visualize KPIs. Configure data connections and customize widget appearance with a drag-and-drop interface.

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$25/User, Monthly, Quote-based
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Tailored to your specific needs
$495 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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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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  • Improved Decision-Making: Access to real-time data and analytics enables more informed and timely business decisions.
  • Enhanced User Experience: Seamless integration with existing applications provides a consistent and intuitive user interface.
  • Increased Efficiency: Automated data processing and reporting reduce the time and effort required for manual data handling.
  • Scalability: Easily scale analytics capabilities as your business grows without significant additional investment.
  • Customization: Tailor dashboards and reports to meet specific business needs and preferences, ensuring relevant insights.
  • Data Security: Robust security features protect sensitive information, ensuring compliance with industry standards.
  • Cost Savings: Reduce the need for multiple analytics tools and associated costs by consolidating functionalities into one platform.
  • Collaboration: Share insights and reports easily across teams, fostering a collaborative environment for data-driven strategies.
  • Real-Time Monitoring: Keep track of key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time, allowing for quick adjustments and proactive management.
  • Actionable Insights: Transform raw data into actionable insights that drive business growth and operational improvements.
  • Integration Capabilities: Connect with various data sources and third-party applications to create a unified analytics ecosystem.
  • Reduced IT Dependency: Empower business users to create and manage their own reports, reducing the burden on IT departments.
  • Flexibility: Adapt to changing business requirements with flexible deployment options, including on-premises and cloud solutions.
  • Performance Optimization: Optimize business processes by identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies through detailed analytics.
  • Competitive Advantage: Gain a competitive edge by leveraging advanced analytics to uncover market trends and opportunities.
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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 different data sources and perform actions like joins, filters and more to preview data through a visual editor. Add calculated fields at a data source level. 
  • Data Connectivity: Access data from various sources, including relational and NoSQL databases, data warehouses, big data systems, REST API services and more. 
  • Data Visualization: Create intuitive visualizations to uncover trends and patterns. Manipulate and interact with data using filters and parameters. Drill down into data to discover valuable insights. Explore information through built-in data exploration capabilities. 
  • Predictive Analytics: Identify seasonal changes and forecast trends with time series analysis. Recognize business risks and gauge trends using robust predictive models. 
  • Security: Host product information on private data centers or public cloud accounts with robust security measures. Leverage row-level security to filter based on specific criteria. Offer trusted authentication to verify user identity. 
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Product Ranking

#3

among all
Embedded Analytics Tools

#35

among all
Embedded Analytics Tools

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

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Embedded Reporting
Security
Embeddability
Mobile Capabilities
Embedded Data Visualization
Embedded Data Visualization
Embedded Reporting
Platform Capabilities

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

MicroStrategy
Bold BI
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Data Management Embeddability Embedded Analytics Embedded Data Visualization Embedded Reporting Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities 85 94 76 90 97 92 90 49 77 22 98 97 62 90 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
Excellent User Sentiment 10 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.

94%
of users recommend this product

Bold BI has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 94% when considering 10 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
n/a
4.2 (544)
n/a
4.3 (63)
4.83 (6)
4.2 (73)
n/a
4.2 (269)
4.5 (4)

Awards

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Bold BI 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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Intuitive Interface: Users praise Bold BI's drag-and-drop interface, finding it easy to create dashboards and reports without coding experience. This is particularly helpful for embedding analytics where technical expertise may be limited.
Customization Options: Bold BI offers a high degree of customization, allowing users to tailor the look and feel of dashboards to match their application's branding. This is crucial for embedded analytics, ensuring a seamless user experience.
Extensive Data Connectivity: Users appreciate Bold BI's ability to connect to a wide range of data sources, including databases, spreadsheets, and cloud services. This flexibility is essential for embedded analytics, which often involves integrating data from various 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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Limited Customization: Users have expressed frustration over the limited ability to customize the look and feel of embedded dashboards, making it challenging to match the branding of their own applications.
Complex Integration: Some users have reported difficulties with the technical aspects of embedding Bold BI, finding the process complex and requiring significant development effort.
Performance Issues: A subset of users have mentioned experiencing performance issues, particularly with larger datasets or complex dashboards, leading to slow loading times and a less than optimal user experience.
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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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Want to make a bold move with your data and know if this is the right solution to accomplish this? User reviews from the last year suggest Bold BI is a solid choice for embedding analytics, but it's not without its quirks. Users praise its drag-and-drop interface and extensive data source compatibility, making dashboard creation a breeze, even for non-techies. They also appreciate the JavaScript SDK, which allows for seamless integration with existing applications. However, some users have voiced concerns about the level of support provided and occasional bugs encountered. What sets Bold BI apart is its modern data architecture, which avoids the use of proprietary cubes, unlike some competitors like Microsoft Power BI. This translates to greater flexibility and control over your data. Users also highlight the platform's scalability and "no-surprises" licensing as major pluses, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses of all sizes. Overall, Bold BI seems best suited for companies looking for a user-friendly embedded analytics platform with robust integration capabilities and a transparent pricing model. However, potential users should be aware of the reported support issues and occasional bugs before taking the plunge.

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