MicroStrategy Reviews & Pricing

by MicroStrategy | Founded 1989, Tysons Corner, VA

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What is MicroStrategy?

Industry Specialties: Serves all industries

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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User Sentiment

Based on 973 reviews:

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MicroStrategy Pricing

Based on our most recent analysis, MicroStrategy pricing starts at $25 (Per User, Monthly, Quote-based).

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Starting From: $25
Pricing Model: Per User, Monthly, Quote-based
Free Trial: No

Training Resources

MicroStrategy is supported with the following types of training:

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars

Support

The following support services are available for MicroStrategy:

Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Help Desk
Knowledge Base
Tickets
Training
24/7 Live Support

MicroStrategy Benefits and Insights

Why use MicroStrategy?

Key differentiators & advantages of MicroStrategy

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.

Industry Expertise

MicroStrategy serves clients in several industries, including finance, insurance, retail and manufacturing. Healthcare organizations, government agencies, media and telecom companies, IT, and higher education institutions use it extensively.

MicroStrategy Reviews

Average customer reviews & user sentiment summary for MicroStrategy:

973 reviews

84%

of users would recommend this product

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Based on an aggregate of MicroStrategy reviews taken from the sources above, the following pros & cons have been curated by a SelectHub Market Analyst.

Pros

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.

Cons

Cost: A majority of the users found the platform to be expensive.
Adoption: Most reviews said the platform had a steep learning curve.

Researcher's Summary:

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.

Key Features

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.

See It In Action: Airbnb Data Analysis

For this review, I tried MicroStrategy Workstation, MicroStrategy Web and Auto Express.

MicroStrategy Workstation

For this review, I picked a guided project on YouTube from the vendor. My dataset included Barcelona Airbnb data. My objective was to search for an affordable Airbnb that wasn’t too far from the city center or metro and had a good guest satisfaction rating. Green and red were my chosen colors for the price.

Tooltips seemed like a great option to view the room type (private, shared or entire apartment), weekend/weekday availability, number of bedrooms and guest satisfaction rating. I tried it with MicroStrategy Workstation and Web separately.

As mentioned above, MicroStrategy Workstation allows multiple charts on a page, though the view can become pretty busy after three visualizations. Resizing and moving them around helped me fit my various views onto the dashboard.

What I loved was the Target Visualizations option to link charts. With it, I could specify which views should change when I applied filters to one visualization.

With Auto Express, I tried my hand at AI analytics with MicroStrategy. The workflow was like creating a dashboard, and I could select the fields to include in the analysis. What I loved was the option to customize the bot according to my business profile and data needs.

Approach to Common Category Challenges

Siloed Data: MicroStrategy has several connectors and the provision to add more. Data aggregation is as easy as combining two tables side-by-side, and it’s all drag-and-drop. Metadata imparts context, and AI bots in Auto Express provide text summaries, regardless of whether you’re analyzing one, two or multiple tables.
Manual Data Wrangling: AI bots, launched with MicroStrategy One in September 2024, enable automating data prep workflows. That said, a final manual review will always be required.
Query Performance Issues: MicroStrategy has in-memory technology that’s always faster than live querying, though the vendor also provides that. Intelligent Cubes allow analyzing data arrays and partitioning tables into smaller chunks for processing.
Software Adoption Pangs: The vendor provides a no-code framework for designing and deploying analytics applications. Additionally, AI-driven bots and text processing lowers the entry barrier for non-technical users.

Cost of Ownership

Frequently asked questions regarding MicroStrategy pricing include:

Q: What are the factors that influence MicroStrategy's pricing?

A: A CPU-based pricing model might be a more cost-effective option if the per-user cost is prohibitive, as it offers unlimited user access.

What sort of deployment do you want? The on-premise installation will cost more, and data migration and customization are necessary overheads.

If you’re thinking of SaaS, MicroStrategy One deploys on AWS and Azure, and you can configure it to operate within private IPs for data security.

Q: How does MicroStrategy's pricing compare to other BI tools?

A: According to Reddit, per-user licensing can vary from $600 to $5,000, depending on the user type (Project Architect, Business User or Developer). The Analytics module starts at $600, while the Basic Cloud Offering for MicroStrategy One will cost you around $62,000 annually.

It includes one named user each for a Client-Architect, Power User and Consumer User, and AWS charges. For simpler data needs, consider lesser-priced solutions.

Q: Are there any hidden costs associated with MicroStrategy?

A: Factor in these cost centers when calculating the product price.

The vendor offers customized training, and the cost will likely depend on the courses, training duration and participants.
Deploying a private cloud will be more secure, but involve infrastructure costs, including ongoing maintenance.
Technical support is often an annual payment.
Though it has several readymade connectors, integration with CRM, ERP and other BI tools will need customization and an understanding of data models for mapping and transformation. Embeddability is another necessary BI requirement. For such specialized tasks, you’ll need to hire developers and data engineers.

Additionally, personalizing views according to your brand will require work. Though not a direct cost, it’s important nonetheless.

License/Subscription Cost	On-Premise: It includes an upfront fee for the server software installation. Cloud-based: It includes user-based pricing for the web and mobile-based platforms. CPU-based payment models are also available.
Installation/Implementation Cost	On-Premise: Included in the upfront license cost. Cloud-based: Included in the subscription cost.
Customization Cost	Dependent on the functional requirements and specific needs of the organization.
Change Management	Dependent on the current software, data complexity and volume, availability of migration tools and the gaps between the existing system and the new system.
Training Cost	Online training and video tutorials are available free of cost. Enterprises can choose from in-center training, live online lectures, on-demand learning, and private on-site engagements to meet their training requirements. Each day of training costs $700 and most courses are two days in length.
Recurring/Renewal Costs (including maintenance costs)	On-Premise: Includes cost for updates, maintenance, upgrades, and patches. Cloud-based/SaaS: Renewal cost is equivalent to the fees paid monthly or annually. The vendor manages upgrades and add-ons at no extra cost.

Pricing Details

Category	Description	Price/Details
Subscription Cost	What is the cost of the software?
Deployment Options	What options are available for product deployment?	On-premise (architecture-based) Cloud-based/SaaS
Pricing Model	What is the pricing model?	Licensing model Subscription-based Architecture-based
Minimum commitment	Is there a minimum monthly or yearly commitment required for purchase?	A minimum yearly commitment is required for the purchase.
Custom Quote	Is there an option for requesting a custom quote?	Available
Free Trial	Does the solution provide a free product trial option?	Available

Limitations

Some of the product limitations include:

Lacks edge analytics.
Lacks automated data modeling.
Lacks built-in voice-enabled searches; users must rely on its integration with Alexa.
The Developer edition is available only on Windows.

Demo Resources

Sample Projects: Try sample projects (retail and HR) on the vendor’s website.
Online Demos: Get a ringside seat to the MicroStrategy REST API demo on the vendor’s website. Gain first-hand experience filtering and sorting data while learning about what the API can do.
Documentation: Download the installation guide to learn what makes it tick. Vendor manuals introduce you to related concepts and provide checklists and examples to get you started.
Training: Sign up for a 12-month subscription to the Analyst or Architect Education Pass for unlimited access to online courses and certifications. The vendor also offers free access to the Business User course and a sandbox environment to try it out. Custom training is available on request.
Third-Party Resources: Learn the ropes with tutorials and guided projects on YouTube. Upskill in data warehouse basics, MicroStrategy fundamentals, data preparation, dashboarding and advanced reporting with edX and TutorialsPoint courses for developers and analysts.

FAQs

Q: How does MicroStrategy handle data integration?

A: MicroStrategy integrates with databases, cloud services and big data platforms using native connectors. What it doesn’t have, it makes up for with custom connectors and APIs.

Schemas define how it organizes datasets, mapping points to where information resides, and data definitions ensure everyone uses the same terms. Like a well-organized library, it enables finding what you need when you need it.

Q: What are the security features of MicroStrategy?

A: User authentication, role-based access control and data encryption keep data secure. SSO is active, and data displays change by user role. You can limit data access to a few pages even when sharing dossiers.

Q: Can MicroStrategy be used for mobile analytics?

A: Yes, it’s available with a paid subscription on Android and iOS devices. Your teams can access dashboards and reports on the go, annotate them, and share them with colleagues. Interactivity capabilities are at par with those of the web version.

The app uses the device’s GPS to provide nearby insights, and its camera to scan barcodes. You can pre-cache content for offline viewing, making it a versatile tool for field operations and remote work scenarios. Our analysts give it a 100 score for mobile capabilities.

Q: How does MicroStrategy support data visualization?

A: You can use it with D3.js and Google Charts to enhance displays. Thanks to metadata, visualizations are dynamic — you can add, replace and remove data at any time.

Its various access modes — in-memory technology, live access and a hybrid approach — keep visualizations up-to-date. Plus, it’s designed to work with big data engines like Hive and Impala.

As mentioned above, natural language processing enables visualizing data with simple instructions, such as Show me a line chart for the revenue trends for the last five years.

Q: What is the learning curve for MicroStrategy?

A: MicroStrategy's learning curve can vary depending on the user's prior experience with BI tools. New users may require training to use its rich features fully, and the vendor provides ample documentation and training resources.

I’m not a fan of the monotonous AI-generated voice-over in the Adobe tutorials, but the content is informative and imparts the necessary skills in using MicroStrategy.

Q: How does MicroStrategy handle large data volumes?

A: Big data processing is at the top of your mind when handling large volumes, especially if you’re currently stuck with manual processes. As discussed above, in-memory analytics and data partitioning help speed up the processing.

Multi-pass SQL involves creating multiple queries to handle a single complex analysis. Subsequently, the database combines the results from these queries to produce the output. Much like a factory assembly line, everything comes together to produce the final product.