Infor Birst vs. Woopra

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.

Incentivized

My rating of Woopra is the absolute best possible. I would recommend them to anyone looking for an analytics website that prefers a visual interface and a beautiful design. I have not encountered any problems using their app -- ZERO! Their integration with other marketing software, such as MailChimp, helps our company zero in on our marketing campaigns and gives us the information we need to make better choices. I LOVE Woopra and think they are the best out there! I have used other websites and there is no comparison!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Woopra tracks *individual users and customer accounts*. It cannot be understated how important this is. Google Analytics and other low cost solutions only sample users and provide aggregate data. For enterprise sales, this is critical. Likewise, for product managers trying to segment product usage by types of accounts, this is incredibly useful.
• Woopra updates user analytics in real time. This is critical in a sales context as you want to be able to follow up quickly on opportunities. Likewise, it is useful for customer success as they can see usage in real time for an individual they are supporting.
• Woopra has the most turnkey integrations of any web analytics solution on the market. By far the most useful are Marketo, SalesForce, and Slack, but there are several more we didn't tap into. While any solution worth its salt has an API, Woopra's integrations usually require a login and/or API key, and you are good to go. Here is the current list: https://www.woopra.com/appconnect/.
• Woopra enables B2B product managers to track product and feature usage by revenue, not just clicks. Again, in a B2B context, this is critical, as there are high-value users and low-value users. Knowing the difference is critical.
• Woopra's implementation is super simple. We were able to set it up with a couple of hours of one frontend developer and some help from our product intern.

• 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

Incentivized

• User explorer could get some upgrades. It has sometimes been difficult to filter some actions, or groups of actions or combine filters.
• Can add more cards to the live dashboard.
• More context data on the user, the device being used, etc.

Incentivized

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.

We just really like the tool. There are lots of us using it internally... from Product, to marketing, to customer service, to optimization team, to traffic acquisition, to Executives. Really helps us answer questions about how well things are going, and what is not going well.

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.

The UI and reports are great overall. Creating reports just requires a few too many screens and clicks. Also dashboard tiles can't be resized. Both of these are easy items that are being addressed

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

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

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.

Team was always responsive and helpful with special use cases.

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.

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.

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.

Compared to other products, the support was a small effort. We only had part time contributions from a product management intern and front end developer.

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.

Incentivized

Woopra is much easier to setup and use than Google Analytics. I've spent hours trying to create custom reports in Google Analytics. Woopra does not take this much time to get solid reporting for our site. If you need something that tracks marketing efforts then Google Analytics will likely be a better fit.

Incentivized

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Really helped us begin to segment our users based on their engagement and retention.
• Helped increase retention by about 1.5% after about 5 months of implementation (don't shoot the messenger if your team can't implement that quickly).
• I felt like it had great potential to create a pipeline between sales and the CSM, but I had trouble getting the sales team to implement it properly as they had their noses deep in calls and emails (they struggle entering notes in SalesForces as well, so it's more a company specific problem).

Incentivized