MicroStrategy vs Zoho Analytics

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Our analysts compared MicroStrategy vs Zoho Analytics 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.

Zoho Analytics 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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Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) allows users to create visualizations and dashboards to present their data via a quick, easy, self-service model. It brings insight and analysis to an organization’s business data on-demand without needing IT assistance or data analysts through extensive automation efforts in several dimensions of the analytical process.

Users can crunch huge datasets, clean and blend data, perform various analytical tasks and visualize the results in dynamic graphics to uncover insights. They can make data-informed business decisions in a stand-alone or embedded environment with support for mobile devices. It has flexible on-premise or cloud deployment models.
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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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  • Visualize Data in Intuitive Graphics: Create insightful, useful dashboards to gain valuable information. Offers an expansive library of visualization types that is expanded frequently. Employees can also blend multiple reports into a single dashboard to gain insight into larger data trends. 
  • Discover Business Operations Insights: Get in-depth, actionable overviews of operations, ranging from sales, finance and marketing to resource management and geographic activity through geo visualizations that facilitate comparison across and between regions. 
  • Perform In-Depth Analysis: Managers can perform deep analytical queries that increase their business intelligence through powerful features like pre-built formulas and functions that identify business metrics and smart forecasting to project future outcomes. 
  • Share and Collaborate on Reports: Provides managers with fine-grained access over the content clients and colleagues can see and edit. Users with access can publish reports, embed them into websites or share them via email for collaboration. Peers can create comment threads on reports as well as add images and annotations. 
  • Embed Into Other Systems: Embed the software’s analytics capabilities into other solutions like CRM platforms, ERP tools or others. Offers seamless integration and a fully re-branded user portal for a continuous user experience across platforms. 
  • Extend the Software as Business Grows: The platform’s extensible, scalable architecture helps build and integrate analytics into applications of any size. Scales up to enterprises using huge volumes of data by utilizing scalable columnar database technology. 
  • Draw Data From Many Sources: Develop a 360-degree view of the organization by blending different types and sources, including outside sources, of data into a single cohesive database, allowing businesses to better answer questions regarding customer behavior, business operations, financial status and more. 
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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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  • Geo Visualization: Sales reps can quickly and easily compare regional performance with interactive map charts. Comparisons can be performed across countries, states, counties and more. 
  • Data Alerts: Managers can set alert conditions that trigger automated alerts when there is a significant change or anomaly in the data. 
  • Report Scheduling: Reports can be scheduled to be published or emailed automatically. Also, schedule recurring reports to generate on a set schedule. 
  • Drag-and-Drop Interface: An intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes generating useful reports quick and easy, without the need for code. View underlying data, set contextual filters, perform data exploration and drill down into the data to gain insights. 
  • White Labeling: The solution is white-labeled to facilitate embedding into websites or applications. Use this technology to embed individual reports or dashboards. 
  • Ask Zia: Zia is a smart analytical assistant built out of a blend of AI and machine learning algorithms. Employees can type out questions in natural query language (NQL), and the assistant will offer answers and suggestions via reports or automatically build and source KPI widgets. 
  • Data Connectors: Connects to a broad range of data connectors, including files and feeds, cloud storage, multiple databases, CRM systems, Google Analytics, marketing platforms, social media, financial platforms, e-commerce platforms, HR and more. 
  • Auto-Joined Data: Auto-joining tables can automatically merge tables linked by a Lookup column (schema attribute). This assists and partially automates cohesive database creation. 
  • Mobile Support: Apps on iOS and Android allow managers to view reports and dashboards from their mobile devices and overwatch operations from anywhere. 
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#23

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

MicroStrategy
Zoho Analytics
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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
Great User Sentiment 748 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.

89%
of users recommend this product

Zoho Analytics has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 89% when considering 748 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (24)
5.0 (14)
4.2 (544)
4.2 (130)
4.3 (63)
4.5 (226)
4.2 (73)
4.5 (168)
4.2 (269)
4.4 (210)

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

we're gathering data

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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Ease of Use: It is a user-friendly platform that makes it easy to upload and control data, as noted by more than 77% of reviewers who mention ease of use.
Integration: Facilitates integration with multiple databases and platforms for greater insights, as reported by 82% of the users noting integrations.
Dashboards: It enables easy creation and sharing of multifaceted, custom dashboards, as observed by 75% of reviewers specifying dashboards.
Flexible Reports: It helps generate dynamic and customizable reports quickly, as stated by 88% of the users who refer to reports.
Implement: This tool is simple to deploy and implement, as noted by 75% of reviewers mentioning the implementation process.
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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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Learning Curve: Around 63% of reviewers who mention the learning curve report that it has a steep learning curve for non-technical users.
User Interface: Its user interface can be confusing because of the multiple options and features available, as noted by over 54% of reviewers that mentioned the user interface.
Limited Queries: All users who refer to queries state that composing and joining queries is limited.
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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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Zoho Analytics is a BI and data analytics software platform that helps users visually analyze data, create visualizations and get a deeper understanding of raw data. It helps users generate dynamic, highly customizable and actionable reports and allows integration with multiple platforms for achieving greater insights. Its multifaceted and customizable dashboards can enhance the user experience. However, many reviewers have reported that the user-interface can be confusing to use with the many options and features available. Also, it has a steep learning curve, and non-technical users might find it difficult to use in the beginning. Overall, it is a user-friendly platform that enables effortless data handling.

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