Likelihood to Recommend Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
Read full review Tableau public is the best platform to build dashboards for your personal profile and share with recruiters. It's always good to keep ourselves updated on the latest features, create sample dashboards and save them to a personal profile.
Tableau public is free and doesn't need any subscription. anyone can create an account and start building reports.
Read full review Pros Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems. Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI. Read full review Data visualization: lots of different options, including bar, scatter, pie, waterfall charts to explore relationships between variables, and to present findings/trends to different teams Integrates readily with limited, though different data sources: TXT, CSV, TDE, Access Exports reports for review of different dashboards: client-ready/team-ready, with a clean and tidy presentation in PDF format (or hardcopy) Read full review Cons Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI Read full review Tableau Public (both Desktop and Server) like their "for a fee" counterparts offer very easy to learn and use tools to transform data into pictures and gain insights into your data. Most organizations report a reduction in development time of 10x vs. other similar tools, due to the intuitive user interface. That said, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are "disconnected" from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes. Users are limited to 1 Gb of storage space per user ID and password as well. I would like to see better options for public sharing of visualizations and data from within the "for a fee" products as more and more organizations are moving in the direction of data sharing with partners and their communities. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
Read full review It's free, right? I'll keep using the free version. So the real question to ask is this? Will I pay $999 for the Personal version or $1,999 for the Professional? Yikes! That is a big stretch. I'm not sure about that. The product comparison chart is at:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/comparison Bonnie Holub Honeywell Endowed Chair in Global Technology Management
Read full review Usability I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.
Read full review Tableau public is a great training tool to understand the basics of
Tableau before buying it. A great tool to extend Excel's visualization and to publish data for others. Not useful for anything you need secure. No ability to access databases. Static information only.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
Read full review Performance Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast
Read full review Support Rating When we have an issue that is stopping our business from proceeding, I want answers sooner than later. While Birst does have a published response time for each case level, we always wish it could be quicker. What response improvement could there be with a larger support team? In response to first question: Blackhole of issues - Birst needs to improve upon closing issues that resolution was dependent upon code fixes or enhancements, perhaps someone to add a comment on all case tickets at least every 60 days. Escalation - I always have the ability to electronically or via phone escalate a ticket. I also have my Customer Success Manager through whom I can escalate topics.
Read full review I have not yet required to contact support as the documentation and help i found online has always worked so far
Read full review In-Person Training I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.
Read full review Online Training Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
Read full review I found it sufficient, and fast. I could easily "kick the tires" with Tableau on my data so I got up and running fast.
Bonnie Holub Honeywell Endowed Chair in Global Technology Management
Read full review Implementation Rating Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
Read full review Start at the end and work backward. Identify the business case / issue and questions the end users have, then identify the data needed, and where to get it.
Read full review Alternatives Considered During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have a lot of demos with a significant portion of them and reviewed several of the major industry studies as well. We had representatives of both user interests/design and the technical backend on the evaluation process.
The major features we were looking for a product that we could embed inside our own SaaS application, connect to a sharded Postgres database, had multitenancy and allowed for customer generated reports/ self-reporting. Some of the minor "nice to have" features we were looking at was scheduled reports, especially if we could plug it into our own scheduling system (for CAN-SPAM compliance), internationalization, and support.
In the evaluation, Birst hit all of the must-haves and enough of the nice to haves that they made it down to our final two and the trial was the clincher to make it our final choice.
Read full review Google Charts /Drive is sufficient for simpler data sets, but it does not integrate with other web platforms and the visualization does not look as professional. I'm not aware of any other competitors that offer the same package as Microsoft.
Read full review Scalability we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
Read full review Return on Investment Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems. Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems. Read full review Tableau Public visualizations have helped drive traffic to our content and sites The lack of cost means it's easy to demonstrate our experience to attract paying clients Read full review ScreenShots