Domo is a full self-service business intelligence software that combines several data analysis and reporting tools into one platform. It helps users connect to multiple data sources, create robust visual reports, manage their data, send messages in real-time, manage projects, and develop new apps.
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Infor Birst
Score 5.0 out of 10
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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.
Our biggest push here was the magic ETL functionality and how simple the set-up was. Cost was also a factor, but our ability to connect our Zendesk and Salesforce instance quickly and build a complex dataset in roughly an hour was very impressive. Much quicker than we …
Birst was better than Domo for our needs because we could get in and tinker with it. Our impression of Domo was that it had a lot of connectors and ready to go reports, but it made too many assumptions about applications we use. We customize too much to use a "ready to go" …
The primary differentiator with Birst is its scalability. Every other system we have developed or reviewed is either very strong in a single focus or requires a large team to manage to deploy over multiple, diverse customers. We have been able to accomplish more successfully …
Birst allows direct access to an internal data store, which none of the products we evaluated provided. We also found the birst ETL layer far more powerful than the other platforms we considered.
I believe that companies that record large amounts of data about their product, service employers KPIs, etc, can make the best out of Domo for reporting and data analysis, but if a company handles little data and is not recording this consistently, it will not be of much use.
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.
Exceptional Transform area of the platform - any/all raw data can be manipulated and combined to create datasources that are very useful for our departments.
Visualization layer is clean and is very business presentable. Its simple but includes depth. Visuals can be created/used by all roles throughout our firm, its not limited to analysts.
Ability to communicate and talk about insights in the data - the communication tool is exceptional. I can @ mention specific users to bring attention to a discovery. I can start a private chat. I can annotate and communicate what I am seeing. I love it.
Mobile experience is excellent. When I am on the road i can actively monitor and engage with my team due to my Domo dashboard on my mobile device. Its amazing to run the business and not worry while away from the office.
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.
Copying Reports - In Excel or Google Sheets, I like to make copies of similar reports and modify them as necessary for users. In Domo, makes copies of reports (called cards) but all copies are connected. So if you adjust the copy, it changes the original. This means a user has to recreate the report from scratch and then adjust it.
Unforgiving SQL - Domo does allow users to write their own SQL codes, which is great. However, Domo's SQL code is pickier than the other SQL database I've used (Metabase).
Text Alerts - Domo's alerts aren't always the smartest. Some of my dashboards are about the sales teams monthly performance and I get notified when there is a change of more than 20%. I always get notified at the start of the month that reports have changed from 'x' number to zero. This is expected because it's a monthly report and I hate getting texts about it. The only reason I don't term them off so I can be aware if something breaks in the middle of the month.
Domo is a great up-and-coming product. There are many fantastic features that are extremely compelling to our end users, which makes Domo a great fit for our organization. As with many BI tools, there are items on the wish list that could make implementation, administration and usage easier, but I believe these will be addressed over time as the product matures and evolves. The overall concept and approach of this solution has definitely raised the bar in this area of expertise and I would like to see things advance in giving the enterprise tools that will make decision making easier and more robust in the future.
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.
The built-in user support and intuitive design of Domo makes it simple to learn and use. I find I can spend hours drilling deep, or else quickly gain an overview in just a few minutes. This is a great advantage since the flexibility fits well with the demands of my role. I enjoy using Domo since I know it will give me comparative data across almost every variable I might want to explore - I look forward to it!
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
Pretty responsive. It took a while to get a response in selecting data points for our particular cards. Might have taken about a month? I am not sure if this was something on our end or Domo's end. But haven't had any other issues yet that required additional support from Domo.
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.
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.
It is a true web-based application so implementation is much easier and smoother compared to other non-web based BI solutions. Also, they offered consulting services during the implementation process, which was helpful. Also, they provided lots of on-demand training courses and videos, which I liked.
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.
At the end of the day, end-user adoption and taking the burden of IT to build reports was my goal. Demoing and testing many BI tools, DOMO is the one that allowed both to happen.
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.
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
I mentioned a "previously un-analyzable" dataset that we were able to visualize in Domo - the result was business re-alignment for increased productivity, cost savings and ROI.
It's tough to quantify the ability to provide insights that have been desired for years but not possible - we continue to amaze our executives and product managers with the analysis we can provide.
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.
