MicroStrategy vs Klipfolio

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Klipfolio 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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Klipfolio is an analytics software tool that helps users wield data intelligently and confidently by building dashboards and reports that track KPIs and monitor trends. Users can glean insights from information across the organization collected in one convenient place and deploy interactive data visualizations that they can share with ease.

It is available through an annual or monthly subscription to one of four plans: Publish, Grow, Team and Team+. The number of dashboards and users allowed, as well as the data refresh rate and level of support varies depending on the pricing plan selected.
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$25/User, Monthly, Quote-based
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$3,000 Annually, Freemium
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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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  • Faster Decisions: Enables faster and better data-driven decision making with a dashboarding tool that shows meaningful KPIs first.
  • Ease of Use: Quickly upload and analyze data with dashboards with a simple architecture on the back-end — no coding required.
  • Simplified Data Sets: Create a range of data visualizations from a single data source, or a single visualization from a range of data sources. Pull raw data directly into the dashboard, removing complicated organization and exploration steps.
  • Integration with BI Tools: Make analytics reporting and visualization easier by integrating with traditional enterprise BI tools like Tableau, Domo, Qlik, Looker and Microsoft Power BI to enhance the data they hold.
  • Holistic BI: Get a more comprehensive view of business metrics across data sources and brand performance on social media, all collected and displayed in one place through data connectivity and data merging.
  • Data Visibility: Gain visibility into business data and understand where the business is at via real-time dashboards and reports.
  • Analytics On-the-Go: Retrieve data from the cloud-based architecture any time, anywhere with an internet connection, unlike on-premise solutions. Access the platform via a native app for both iOS and Android mobile devices as well as via web browsers.
  • Boost Collaboration: Align all stakeholders and employees with organizational goals by collaborating and sharing data with others internally and externally, whether in real time or periodically.
  • Scalability: Pay only for the required level of functionality and upgrade, downgrade or cancel the plan at any time. Add additional dashboards to any plan at a flat rate or consult the support team for a custom solution that can support hundreds to thousands of dashboards at once.
  • Free Trial: Test it firsthand through a free 14-day trial.
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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 Connectivity: Retrieve data from thousands of different data sources with hundreds of built-in data connectors that include many of the most commonly sought-after data points. Connect to even more types of data with custom queries made through open web services. Or, pull data from SQL databases by uploading files the old-fashioned way and establishing FTP server connections.
  • Insight into Social Media: Blend social media data with other proprietary business data to interpret and present brand performance on social platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.
  • Automated Data Retrieval: Automate data retrieval for visualizations from a range of data sources that automatically update on detecting a change in users’ data. Refreshes every 30 minutes by default, but can refresh at a faster rate on certain subscription plans.
  • Data Merging: Mash up information from disparate data sources to create insights that track desired KPIs with a more holistic view of business performance.
  • Data History With PowerMetrics: Leverage PowerMetrics to track and store multi-dimensional data points for metrics and provide continuous insights into current and historical information even for data services that don’t offer history, i.e. social media feeds. Explore historical trends by comparing time periods.
  • Data Visualizations: Maximize a dashboard’s visual impact by choosing from 15 different types of customizable visualizations.
  • Self-Service Interactivity: Deep-dive into dashboards by filtering and segmenting data by specific dimensions or adjusting date ranges. Gain context from insights with automatic trend lines and applied actions like grouping, filtering, aggregating and sorting.
  • Pre-built and Customizable Dashboards: Easily create dashboards by choosing a pre-built dashboard from a range of template options or create an entirely customized one.
  • Targets and Indicators: Keep track when metrics fall below or reach conditional pre-set thresholds with notifications and indicators that alert of both trends and potential issues or successes.
  • Sharing: Share access to dashboards and visualizations with a single click and download them as images or PDFs for sharing across social media or messaging apps. Set up scheduled reports to be distributed to a specific list of members on a regular basis. Embed dashboards into websites or other applications, display on TVs, or make them public for easy visibility with custom generated URLs.
  • Search Function: Search for data points, visualizations or dashboards using natural query language (NQL) search function, similar to how one would search using Google or other search engines.
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Product Ranking

#15

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#19

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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
Klipfolio
+ 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 578 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.

93%
of users recommend this product

Klipfolio has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 93% when considering 578 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
4.7 (28)
4.2 (544)
4.6 (165)
4.3 (63)
4.73 (169)
n/a
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4.2 (73)
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4.2 (269)
4.6 (52)

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

Klipfolio 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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Data Management: Approximately 94% of users who mentioned data preparation said that the platform helps create focused data models to power insightful and dynamic project dashboards.
Data Source Connectivity: Around 81% of users who mentioned its integration capabilities said that the tailored integration options of the platform are complemented by easy-to-use APIs and SQL queries to pull data from disparate data sources.
Functionality: Approximately 79% of users who reviewed its functionality said that the platform has a multitude of features for self-service data analysis to efficiently acquire valuable business insights.
Service and Support: Around 96% of users who reviewed support services said that they were very responsive and helpful, with fast turnaround times.
Cost: The free trial period is a big plus, and the solution gives value for money, approximately 81% of users who reviewed the tool’s cost said.
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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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Speed: All users who reviewed its speed say that the platform is slow to load, with noticeable latency in data refresh.
Steep Learning Curve: Approximately 78% of users who reviewed training say that there is a steep learning curve to the platform, especially for formulas and functions.
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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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Klipfolio is a business intelligence tool that empowers users to visualize, analyze and share business data to track product trends. With powerful data querying capabilities via SQL and APIs, the solution integrates well with a multitude of applications. Users leverage its rich visualization libraries and strong data modeling capabilities to create impactful data dashboards, though some users said that the platform was sometimes buggy and had a limited scope in managing complex KPIs. With its vast range of features, users create and share reports on data that matters via URLs, PDFs, scheduled emails and snapshots to power decision-making processes. Approximately 96% of users who mentioned the platform’s support services said that the team was helpful and responsive. Most of the users who mentioned pricing said that the solution was affordable for organizations of all sizes and provided value for money. The solution does have some limitations though. All users who reviewed it for speed said that the platform slowed down, especially when applying filters, large file uploads and data refresh. Of users who reviewed its data integration capabilities, some said that the data source limit of 10 MB that comes with certain pricing plans can be limiting, especially when working with larger Excel and CSV files. Of users who mentioned cost, a few said that the additional fee for the periodic data refresh feature was a burden, though the introductory free trial offer could be quite attractive for new users. In summary, Klipfolio is a web and cloud-based BI solution that offers a range of data integration, KPI monitoring and dashboarding capabilities to empower data-driven decision-making across organizations.

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