Chartio is a visualization tool designed to enable anyone to explore, transform and visualize data on the fly through a drag-and-drop interface. Chartio was acquired by Atlassian in February 2021 so that it's capabilities could be integrated into the Atlassian product portfolio's capabilities. Chartio is no longer available to new customers, standalone. Existing customers must migrate to alternatives by March 2022, when the service will be retired.
$40
per user/per month
Infor Birst
Score 3.7 out of 10
N/A
Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.
I kind of hit on this earlier, but simply put: Usability. We were given tutorials by our Data Science team using Birst, and even they encountered a few hiccups explaining things: they use this everyday! We trialed Chartio with people having zero BI software experience and they …
Chartio is a great tool for building presentable dashboards. It can export, you can add read-only access, and it has permissions levels by dashboard for users. There are other data analysis tools that help to analyze the data, but few allow for such a nice presentation
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.
Direct linkage to our databases. Abstracts away the visualization layer so we can focus on the data and the queries.
Host of graphs and tools that permits all types of data visualizations.
Haven't quite used this yet, but there is a new embedding feature that will be very helpful so that we can embed the charts into a company central dash.
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.
There is not a last full month date range option. You can still get the range that you need, but the dashboards will have to be manually updated to exclusively display one whole month.
When building a chart, the area which displays your tables and fields is finite. You can't adjust the size to make it easier to see. They do allow a mouse-over to see the entire name of your table/field, but I would prefer to adjust the width.
Once you modify a query in the Custom Query tab, there doesn't seem to be a way to go back to using the U.I.
Great customer support: You will receive an answer by email usually within 20-30 minutes. Not only that but our CSMs for Chartio go out of their way to help, they have even created charts for some of the less experienced users that wanted an example to work from. We have had nothing but great experiences with this team.
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.
I really like using Chartio. I use it on a daily basis for pulling data from different sources and combining data (the explore tab was a great idea for this use). I think I would give it 8/10 because there needs to be more documentation or maybe blog posts about things people are doing with it. I only have my own ideas about what to do /how to graph things. I know there are some articles, but it would be awesome to have a section on the neat dashboards people are building or how they show data in different ways. Another complaint is how much time it takes to load. I know our databases aren't set up precisely for Chartio and I have been creating data stores. But the data stores have so many more limitations that adds a whole new layer of frustration. Love the product, keep up the good work and the fast fixes.
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.
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.
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.
I use self learning materials. Pretty helpful. I find myself having to go back to the "drilldown" instructions though, and have a hard time finding hidden variables on a dashboard, so perhaps there is room for intuitive improvements (or maybe I'm just being lazy)
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.
Chartio so far has been the easiest BI tool to setup and has also been the most affordable. There are some other, great, BI tools out there but they were a bit to heavy handed for what we needed. Also - despite the high cost per user in Chartio, the other tools were still more expensive.
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.
Chartio has worked well as our datawarehouse has rapidly expanded, and the usability/performance hasn't seemed to have suffered. What we haven't yet realized is additional savings from additional users. We have some dashboard needs for users who truly just view of a few charts, and the licensing structure hasn't yet been structured in a way that would support that type of approach...having 50 "core" licenses, and then potentially several hundred view only licenses for partners that would use the application infrequently.
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.
