MicroStrategy vs Chartio

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.

Chartio is a SaaS BI tool that rates quite highly with its user base, thanks to a myriad of unique benefits and features that help companies save time and increase productivity. Most significantly, many reviews focused on its ease of use — not only is the platform user-friendly and intuitive, with a clean, drag-and-drop interface, but it’s also designed to help users build SQL queries without coding knowledge. Easy to pick up, it’s also easy to master, with a remarkably short learning curve due to built-in tools and tips, as well as an abundance of vendor-provided documentation, online resources and proactive customer support. Many users reported that this tool increased organization-wide data literacy and reduced reliance on their IT, R&D and analyst departments by providing truly self-service BI. In addition, it facilitates smooth collaboration and painless sharing of insights. Users also praised its data analysis functionality, which gives insight into overarching trends while inviting deeper exploration at a granular level through flexible filters, slice-and-dice tools and drill-down capabilities. This tool’s data visualization and dashboarding features, while lacking in some customization compared to competitors, help users track KPIs and see metrics from all of their data sources in one place. However, some reviews mentioned that this solution suffers from slow loading times and refresh rates, especially with larger data sets. Another con cited by several users is its cost: while some say that it’s affordable, others say that it’s too expensive for what it provides and that the price hike associated with adding embedding to pricing plans is too high. For businesses specifically looking for a mobile app, this tool may not be the right fit, as there is currently no mobile app. Though it lacks some advanced features needed by power users or provided by other alternatives, some reviews said that this is a trade-off for its ease of use with business users. Overall, Chartio is a great fit for businesses seeking to empower all their employees with data-driven decision making and encourage them to discover their own insights, while reducing the burden on their IT department.