MicroStrategy vs ThoughtSpot

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.

ThoughtSpot is a powerful and reliable solution with the capability to deep-dive into data with an impressive level of granularity to perform business data analysis. With its AI-powered offering, SpotIQ, this platform enables easy data querying with intuitive drop-downs and suggestions to retrieve relevant business data for analysis and presentation. In addition, users can save and share their queries with other users with one simple click. In-memory data caching makes for faster data retrieval and creation of data visualizations on the fly, though some users feel that the platform should have more formatting options for better dashboard customization. With the capability to transform massive amounts of data sets into real-time analytics in seconds, this platform has a user-friendly interface that affords even non-technical users the autonomy to use data to discover anomalies and trends with minimal effort. Astutely recognizing the latency inherent in moving data between data sources and analytics platforms, the solution now offers direct querying into the in-cloud data warehouse Snowflake via its offering - Embrace. Users praise the pricing model of this tool since the cost incurred depends on the storage space consumed, not the number of users. The solution does have its limitations, though. Quite a few users say that implementing natural language processing (NLP) requires a lot of pre-work and that AI-powered searches can slow systems down. Data models have to be specifically tailored to the platform, which makes them inflexible for reuse. Though the tool is supported by all major browsers, users can face UI or performance issues with using it on Internet Explorer. As uploading Excel files is still the best way to push data into the platform, data import can be time consuming. Users feel that updated technical documentation and reporting tool tips for the dashboard UI could help shorten the learning curve. Deployment can be challenging for small businesses without IT support. Some users who reviewed it based on cost feel that this tool can be expensive for mid-level businesses. To summarize, businesses can leverage ThoughtSpot’s excellent AI-powered capabilities to share dynamic, real-time data analyses with employees and clients to drive effective decision-making within their organizations.