MicroStrategy vs QuickSight

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs QuickSight 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.

QuickSight 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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Amazon QuickSight is a business intelligence tool that enables organizations to visualize and analyze data, derive insights, and make informed decisions. It empowers users with interactive dashboards, data exploration capabilities, and machine learning-driven insights, making it an ideal solution for businesses seeking to leverage data for better outcomes.

The benefits of Amazon QuickSight include its ease of use, fast performance, and scalability to handle large datasets. Its popular features include natural language querying, automated insights generation, and integration with other AWS services. Compared to similar products, Amazon QuickSight stands out for its affordability, ease of deployment, and robust feature set.

Pricing for Amazon QuickSight is based on a per-user, per-month subscription model. It offers flexible pricing options to accommodate varying business needs, ensuring cost-effectiveness and scalability as organizations grow.

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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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  • Self-Service BI: Get answers to questions and share insights independently through self-service analysis of business data. Connect to data sources, manipulate values to create visualizations, invite others to collaborate and share dashboards and reports — all without the need to install any application. 
  • Multi-Tenancy: Its multi-tenant architecture with namespaces allows vendors to provide data exploration and dashboarding capabilities for multiple applications at the same time. Host multiple clients and add templates created and shared by dashboard authors to the proprietary visualizations library. 
  • Embedded Analytics: Embed dashboard sessions into proprietary software to enhance business with console analytics. Personalize the appearance of visualizations and reports by adding custom fonts, colors and styles. Set defaults and error handling to match the host application for a cohesive feel. 
  • Report Sharing: Stay informed as to how key metrics are performing by scheduling automatic email updates. Ensure secure access to dashboards and email reports by showing only relevant data through targeted reports. 
  • Flexible Pricing: Save on upfront costs and capacity planning through its p    ay-as-you-go pricing model for report consumers — people who view dashboards, but don’t create them. 
  • Mobility: Get data insight and forecasting summaries on-the-go through its mobile version, available on both iOS and Android. Drill down into mobile-optimized dashboards and reports for in-depth analysis and filter to view specific metrics, even when away from the office. Share results with others and get email alerts for changes in business data as they happen. 
  • Automate Deployments: Deploy applications at scale, keeping them online for continued access while minimizing downtime. AWS CodeDeploy provides automated app deployments to multiple cloud compute services, such as Amazon EC2, AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda, and on-premise servers. Seamlessly integrates with continuous delivery process pipelines, such as AWS CodePipeline, GitHub and Jenkins. 
  • Promote Data Literacy: Identify key metrics, perform what-if analysis through simple point-and-click actions, discover hidden trends and generate forecasts — without needing any technical skills. Generates dashboard summaries in easy-to-understand language to enable shared understanding of data insights. 
  • Scalable: Its serverless architecture makes it easily scalable, ensuring fast loading of dashboards even during peak traffic. Scales as the organization grows to take on larger loads — no need to set up dedicated servers. 
  • Data Security: Its Enterprise version provides additional security features through permissions-based access to AWS data, row level security, SSO and data encryption. It is FedRamp, HIPAA, PCI PSS, ISO and SOC compliant, keeping with industry best practices. 
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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: Connect to a multitude of cloud-based and on-premise data sources such as Salesforce, JIRA, Github, Teradata, MySQL, SQL Server, Postgres and many more, or upload data from Excel, JSON, CSV and Presto files. 
  • Integrations: Perform predictive data analysis by integrating Amazon Sagemaker ML-based data models with its supported data sources, such as S3, Athena, Redshift, as well as third party sources that include Salesforce and JIRA, among others. Easily integrates with BI tools such as Domo and Tableau for data querying through an intuitively similar SQL interface. 
  • Data Visualization: Create interactive visualizations and reports by choosing from a rich library of graphs, charts and tables. Build dynamic dashboards by interacting with data in real time through drag-and-drop, drill-down and filtering options. 
  • Reporting: Its Enterprise edition provides ad-hoc as well as scheduled reporting to share targeted reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Subscribe to receive reports via email. Creates a custom snapshot of the report based on individual data permissions. 
  • In-Memory Engine: Perform calculations and analyses at the speed of thought by querying through its super-fast parallel in-memory calculation engine, SPICE. Built from the ground up, it prepares data faster by replicating it in memory and updates in real-time as the underlying data changes. 
  • Dashboards: Create data dashboards with 28 supported charts, such as filled maps, histograms, funnel charts, stacked area charts, waterfall charts and boxplots, as well as tables and pivot tables. View information based on business context by sorting on fields not shown in the visualization. Provide report readers with on-sheet controls to slice and dice data by filtering on fields. Offers multiple report layout customization options that include adding drop-downs with single-select or multi-select sorting. 
  • ML-Based Insight: Get in-depth data insights through its out-of-the-box ML and NLP capabilities. Perform queries on data in seconds in simple language through its natural language attribute, Q. It learns from data patterns to provide accurate predictions based on historical trends. Detect anomalies and variations in data aggregates through scheduled anomaly detection. 
  • Localization: Available as a global solution with support for 10 major languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. 
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Product Ranking

#15

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Business Intelligence Tools

#80

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Availability and Scalability
Data Management
Data Pre-processing
Data Visualization
Embedded Analytics Capabilities
Availability and Scalability
Data Management
Platform Compliance
Platform Security
Data Visualization

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 75 54 100 95 90 99 86 73 79 83 88 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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Self-Service Analytics: QuickSight empowers business users to create and customize visualizations, dashboards, and reports without relying on IT or data scientists.
Cloud-Based Platform: QuickSight's cloud-based architecture eliminates the need for costly on-premise infrastructure and provides seamless access from anywhere with an internet connection.
Scalability and Performance: QuickSight handles large datasets efficiently, allowing users to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time.
Easy Integration: QuickSight seamlessly integrates with popular data sources, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon Aurora, and Salesforce, enabling users to access and analyze data from various systems.
Machine Learning Capabilities: QuickSight leverages machine learning algorithms to provide predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and automated insights, empowering users to uncover hidden patterns and make data-driven decisions.
Collaboration and Sharing: QuickSight facilitates collaboration among teams by allowing users to share dashboards, reports, and insights securely.
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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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Pricing Structure: Complicated pricing model that can lead to unexpected costs for advanced features and usage.
Limited Customization: Pre-built dashboards and visualizations may not fully meet specific business requirements, limiting customization options.
Data Connectivity: May not seamlessly integrate with all data sources, requiring additional effort for data preparation and ingestion.
Limited Advanced Analytics: Lacks certain advanced analytical capabilities, such as predictive modeling and machine learning algorithms, which may be essential for deeper insights.
User Interface: Some users find the user interface to be cluttered and not as intuitive as other BI tools, impacting the ease of use.
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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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Amazon QuickSight has received positive user reviews for its ease of use, intuitive interface, and quick data visualization capabilities. Users find it simple to connect to data sources, create dashboards, and generate insights. The drag-and-drop functionality and pre-built templates make it accessible to users of all technical skill levels. QuickSight's strengths include its integration with other Amazon Web Services (AWS) products, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3, allowing for seamless data analysis. It also offers advanced features like machine learning-powered insights and natural language querying, providing users with deeper analytical capabilities. Compared to similar products, QuickSight is praised for its cost-effectiveness and scalability. Users appreciate its pay-as-you-go pricing model and the ability to handle large datasets without performance issues. However, some users have expressed concerns about the limited customization options and the lack of certain advanced features found in competing products. Overall, Amazon QuickSight is well-suited for businesses and organizations looking for an easy-to-use and affordable business intelligence solution. Its intuitive interface, integration with AWS products, and scalability make it a valuable tool for data visualization, analysis, and decision-making.

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