MicroStrategy vs Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services 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.

Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services 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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Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS) helps organizations transform raw data into actionable insights through a suite of cloud-based tools. It allows users to gather, store, analyze, and visualize data to make data-driven decisions. BICS is ideal for businesses of all sizes seeking comprehensive BI solutions without the need for extensive on-premises infrastructure. Key benefits include centralized data access, self-service analytics, and pre-built dashboards for quick insights. Popular features include interactive dashboards, data exploration tools, and mobile access for on-the-go analysis. User reviews highlight BICS' scalability, ease of use, and powerful data analysis capabilities. Pricing varies based on deployment options and features selected. Subscription models offer flexible payment options and scalability. Compared to similar products, BICS offers competitive pricing and a comprehensive set of features, making it a strong choice for businesses seeking a robust and cost-effective BI solution.

Pros
  • Scalable
  • Easy to use
  • Powerful data analysis
  • Mobile access
  • Competitive pricing
Cons
  • Limited customization
  • Steep learning curve for advanced features
  • Limited data connectors
  • Potential vendor lock-in
  • Limited customer support
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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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  • Business Insights: Offers users the ability to get a deeper understanding of what is happening in their business on a day-to-day basis as well as from a broad overview perspective.
  • Strategic Predictions: Using historical data, users can make more accurate predictions and forecasts of future business results.
  • Smart Visualizations: Users can create stunning graphics with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and easily adjust layouts. The solution offers users the optimal visualization for the type of data selected, but users can also change the visualization type to view data from multiple angles.
  • Interconnected Interface: Data and visualizations are tied together. Therefore, highlighting data within a certain visual automatically highlights correlating data in other visuals, easily revealing patterns and trends that may not have been obvious.
  • Ease of Use: Simple, clean UI offers easy navigation through the homepage, answers page and dashboards. Nesting and borders in the interface help users stay focused on the data instead of distracting elements of the application.
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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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  • Visual Analytics: Creates graphical visualizations of data to make analyzing insights faster, easier and more accessible.
  • Connected Interface: Data and all visualizations are all tied together, and changes or highlighting in one will be mirrored in the others. This dynamic experience lets visualizations function as connected filters and guiding users through their exploration.
  • Data Blending: Infers correlations between data sets to easily mash personal with managed data. Extends dimensions to add facts or improve the timeliness and relevance of analysis.
  • Mobile Application: Provides an agile mobile experience spanning users’ data portfolio that offers a consistent interface with the desktop application. Users can access analytics instantly on any device.
  • Range of Report Types: The system offers a variety of report types including ad-hoc queries and analysis, enterprise reporting, dashboards, mobile analytics, multidimensional OLAP, scorecards and predictive analytics.
  • BI Server: In-memory optimizations provide quick rollups, powerful compression, faster rollups and sophisticated memory usage for a range of data sizes.
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#396

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
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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.

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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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Scalability: Easily scales to accommodate growing data volumes and user needs.
Ease of Use: User-friendly interface and intuitive features for both technical and non-technical users.
Self-Service Analytics: Empowers users across departments to explore data and generate insights without relying on IT.
Data Integration: Integrates data from various sources into a single platform for a unified view of business performance.
Powerful Data Analysis: Advanced data exploration and analysis tools for uncovering hidden trends and patterns.
Mobile Access: Access data and insights from anywhere, anytime on mobile devices.
Cost-Effectiveness: Competitive pricing and flexible subscription options make it accessible for businesses of all sizes.
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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: Pre-built dashboards and reports offer limited flexibility for advanced users.
Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Features: Mastering advanced features requires significant training and technical expertise.
Limited Data Connectors: May not support all specific data sources required by some businesses.
Potential Vendor Lock-in: Migrating data and insights to another platform can be complex and time-consuming.
Limited Customer Support: Some users report challenges in accessing timely and comprehensive customer support.
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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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User reviews of Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS) paint a picture of a powerful and easy-to-use BI platform with some limitations. Users praise its scalability, self-service analytics, and data integration capabilities, which empower them to make data-driven decisions without relying heavily on IT. As one user stated, "BICS has transformed how we analyze data. Now everyone from sales to finance can access insights and make informed decisions, which has significantly improved our efficiency and performance." However, some users find the platform to be less customizable than competitors like Tableau and Power BI, with limited options for building custom dashboards and reports. Additionally, the learning curve for advanced features can be steep, and some users report limited support for specific data sources. One user commented, "While BICS is great for basic reporting, it lacks the flexibility and advanced features I need for complex analysis. I find myself often switching to other tools for more in-depth work." Despite these limitations, users generally agree that BICS offers a compelling value proposition for businesses seeking a comprehensive and cost-effective BI solution. Its strengths in scalability, ease of use, and data integration set it apart from competitors, making it a good choice for organizations of all sizes. As one user summarized, "BICS may not be the most customizable BI platform out there, but its ease of use, data integration capabilities, and competitive pricing make it a great choice for our company. It helps us get the insights we need to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition." Ultimately, whether BICS is the right BI platform for your organization depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you are looking for a user-friendly and scalable solution with strong data integration capabilities, BICS is definitely worth considering. However, if you require a highly customizable platform for advanced analysis or have specific data source requirements, other options might be better suited for your needs.

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