MicroStrategy Analytics vs. SAS Enterprise Guide

MSTR is great for any organization that is looking for a way to deliver complicated data in an uncomplicated way. From business teams to marketing and finance, several departments benefit from using MSTR to keep track of KPIs enabling teams to make optimizations along the way. MSTR provides great visual representations of data enabling team members to distill thousands of data points into easily digestible charts and graphs

Incentivized

For writing out longer code creation for shaping data on complicated reports, the clean UI is helpful. If exploring data though, SAS Studio would be better suited given its easier interface for GUI graph building.

Incentivized

• I think the dashboards are quite helpful to visualize on the spot data.
• Creation of facts and attributes is simple - I have no programming experience and was still able to create and modify these items.
• Scheduling reports to be run on a daily, weekly, or hourly basis is simple. It provides updated data on a timed basis with no need to go back into the program.

Incentivized

• It can load a huge amount of data as compared to R Studio and Excel.
• Data processing speed is very fast, millions of records are loaded into this software very easily and data manipulation is also very easy.
• Inbuilt Statistical functions and procedures make it very comfortable to use for non analytics professionals as well.

• Visual Insight have multiple limitations. Few of them are listed here - i)Cannot change default graph colors ii) text/graph formatting are very very limited iii)Add metric to Color by / Thresholds is not possible iv)one of the worst limitation of the VI in older versions is that it is not possible to create filters that apply only to a specific visualization. For example if there are 4 graphs in one dashboard & if you have filters then those filters would be applicable for all of them
• Some formatting options are not there either on Web or Developer especially while dealing with a document. We have to use both Web & Developer to solve issues.
• While connecting with MDX cube reporting loses a lot of features.

• I would like to see advance interactions with external databases to be able to kill ongoing queries from SAS. As of now, you can stop pretty much any ongoing process besides the one running on a remote database (killing SAS/EG doesn't stop the remote process)
• When creating prompts for programs, it would be nice to be able to have conditional prompts (based on the selection of other prompts). The prompts are clearly a recent feature and constantly under development but I wish it would be more powerful.
• More of a SAS metadata issue but when loading SAS/EG (first connection to the server), it takes a few seconds which feels like a long time. I really don't understand why the initialization of the session can take so long. Don't get me wrong, this has no real impact on productivity but that 10s delay just feels really like eternity when you want to run some code in a new session.

I would always choose to renew MicroStrategy as long as they lead the market in features, functionality and price. The support of MicroStrategy is timely and professional, I frequently get answers to my questions within 24 hours and normally have solutions within 48 hours. Training available for MicroStrategy completely covers everything required to be able to expertly use MicroStrategy and understand data warehousing.

Incentivized

On account of current user experience and the organization-wide acceptance.

Overall for most functions it is incredibly easy to use and understand - however more complicated features are very technical and require training skill. There is the possibility of creating reports that return inaccurate information if you do not have a solid understanding of the information.

It's not all bad, but I don't believe that an enterprise purchase of SAS is worth the expense considering the widely available set of tools in the data analytics space at the moment. In my company, it's a good tool because others use it. Otherwise, I wouldn't purchase a new set of it because it doesn't have some of the better analytical functions in it.

Incentivized

I've never had an issue with MicroStrategy not being available due to MicroStrategy application malfunction. It is very robust and only failures I've seen were due to user error or the platform the machine running the service failed some how.

Incentivized

Being able to customize the performance based on the business need is extremely powerful. Proper configuration and understanding of the usage pattern is key, if the technical ability of the architect is not at top level, then the product will not be configured correctly which will lead to poor performance.

Incentivized

[I feel as if] they answer the phone quickly, but can't answer any of your questions. Will get lost in a support ticketing system. Better off finding third-party online forums of MicroStrategy Analytics users huddled together trying to help each other do the most basic things.

Although I use SAS support for information on functions, these are SAS related and haven't really come across anything that is specifically for SAS EG.

Incentivized

I have attended many trainings offered by MicroStrategy; both distance and in-person training. I earned my CRD (Certified Report Developer) certification via the online training. I found the training to be well organized and concise. Overall I will definitely continue to increase my knowledge with MicroStrategy via the online training offering.

We measured following KPI for the success

• Increase in Business Feeds Loads
• Reduction in Controllers Manual Work.
• Conversion of Manual Work into Systematic Workflows.
• Increase in Customer Spend
• Reduction in Service costs
• Reduction in time-to-market for new campaigns
• Increase in cross sell and Up sell
• Error reduction in customer Identification
• Existing client retained

Incentivized

I've not worked hands-on with the implementation team, but there were no escalations barring a few hiccups in the deployment due to change in requirement & adoption to our company's remote servers.

[I feel like} Microsoft BI - MicroStrategy Analytics is worse in every way. Less templates, less canned reports, less third party integrations, less knowledgable consultants/employees, less core capability, much worse migration path to the cloud (Azure in Microsoft's case), and ultimately turned out to be higher cost when we had to start adding modules and pay for professional services to do even the most basic reporting Google Charts - Not as fare comparison since this is a free SaaS product, but when we couldn't get things working with MicroStrategy Analytics, we starting using Charts just to get data out the door for the company. Amazing how easy it is, and free. Provides WAY more robust capabilities in your web browser for free.

Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, rather do clicking.

Incentivized

This software is extremely scaleable, one can add more core servers which performs as a load balancing. The configurations available to manage usage patterns and daily activity are as high a caliber as any other enterprise level software. This product can be installed on both a windows and unix platform allow for integration on a budget.

Incentivized

• MicroStrategy was helpful for reducing the amount of time we needed to spend number crunching large data sets, and in doing so, allowed me as the primary users to spend more time gleaning insights from the data that in turn informed our leadership team to make strategic decisions.
• By creating numerous canned reports available to all members of the team through email distribution or basic access to the platform, we were able to reduce the time I spent showing people how to pull the data in Microsoft Excel by nearly 40% .
• We ended up needing to make many changes to the way our DMP was feeding data into MicroStrategy due to incorrect reporting that caused complications in accounting and finance.

• Faster decision making, through powerful big data handling functionalities.
• Faster operations on daily basis, once the project tree is built, unskilled personnel can use it in their daily operation.
• Don’t need to choose SAS EG if you are not going to be handling big data. (such as over 1 million rows and 50 columns)
• You need skilled personnel to build the initial project tree.

Incentivized