Factiva from Dow Jones is a data service that helps companies identify opportunities, accelerate decisions and manage a business's reputation, that includes global news and data accessible via the Dow Jones' research platform, on mobile devices or integrated via advanced feeds and APIs.
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Infor Birst
Score 6.4 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.
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SAP Crystal
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.
$295
per single user license
Pricing
Factiva
Infor Birst
SAP Crystal
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Upgrade Version to SAP Crystal Reports 2020
$295
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2020 64-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2016 32-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL
$869
per user license + first year maintenance to be added
SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL
$8,744
5 concurrent users + first year maintenance to be added
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Factiva
Infor Birst
SAP Crystal
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 Viewer allows you to view static data within a SAP Crystal Reports file.
* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Full version allows you to create powerful, richly formatted, and dynamic reports from virtually any data source, delivered in dozens of formats, in up to 28 languages. If you already have an older version of Crystal Reports, buy a license for SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Upgrade at a discounted, upgrade price.
* SAP Crystal Server 2020, 1 NUL includes 1 license of: SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - SAP Crystal Server 2020.
* As an add-on to SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL, SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL allows you to support a wider, intermittent audience of end users, up to five logged on at the same time.
A large part of our work depends on the ability to source quality media content from a breadth of dependable sources globally. This is Factiva's bread and butter: it has a very comprehensive list of 'quality' media sources such as nationals, dailies, business journals and magazines from around the world that are easily mined for the content they hold. If you're thinking about anything other than these 'traditional' media sources then Factiva probably isn't your thing. It doesn't do social media.
Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics are well suited for advanced analytics and business intelligence. It has flexible deployment features and a lot of configuration ability with low code - no coding ability. Ability to ingest data from multiple live data sources. Source data from multiple sources can be segregated into multiple sections based on business criteria. Easily searchable business terms (metadata) across all enterprise analytic content.
Generation of templated reports is the strong suit of SAP Crystal. Allows users to change formats in templates bases on requirement with minimal effort. Automated report delivery requires the user to be aware of sql which cannot be expected from all users. Should support more document export formats and improve the UI for SAP B1 Users
Factiva offers excellent search builders so that I am able to narrow my search to specific companies or topics very easily.
Factiva combines a large number of credible sources into one place and allows me to search all of these sources.
Factiva's use of timestamps helps me understand when the news was known by the market which allows me to analyze how (if at all) that particular piece of news impacted the company's stock price.
Provides an excellent starting place for learning about a company and/or industry.
End-to-end solution, from raw source data, ETL, warehousing and reporting, Birst is able to do everything we need in one package instead of needing to develop and maintain multiple technologies
Intuitive report development. The drag and drop creation of reports is simple. More complicated queries are easy to generate.
Very user-friendly and interactive. A lot of nice features are available both for developers and end users to streamline the process of preparing and consuming data
Rich API which allows us to programmatically interact with Birst
Crystal Reports allows us to create a consistent template for all of our reports.
Crystal Reports and Server allows us to house a repository for all of our reports to make them easy to find and update when necessary.
Crystal Reports can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
Crystal Reports can be a little daunting when first implementing. There are a lot of nuances in learning how to truly master this software and it can be frustrating at times.
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 have been using this product for so many years and it has truly become a cornerstone to our business processes when it comes to developing and distributing information via reports. We currently have over 500 reports developed to date over about 30 systems and that will continue to grow as user needs change.
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.
Crystal is very robust, but not always easy to use. It create wonderful looking reports, and so deserves a high rating. However, I have to take a couple of points off for the simple fact that I cannot hand it to a user and expect them to be able to do development with it.
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.
The support community can be difficult to navigate. I've also run into issues with my login. The SAP system has a bizarre mechanism for validating users that requires users to have what is called an S-ID. A basic ID may not give you access to all the features in the portal. The limitation may include not being able to perform a simple task like downloading patches and updates. This isn't a big deal for single user license but for teams it can be a pain.
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.
Just like any other implementation: When designing the differing reports, get end users' input, make sure to design the reports so that they display the information that the company requires, in the best and clearest way possible.
Test, test, test, revise when needed, and, particularly, do sufficient training so users are comfortable using Crystal Reports!
At the time, Factiva was already being used by the company I worked for - they had developed procedures specifically for using Factiva, so there wasn't really an option. I've used Lexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg exclusively for legal research, so there wasn't really an overlap with Factiva.
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" solution like that. When we looked at Tableau, we liked its visualization capabilities, but it wasn't going to help us do the extractions, ETL, and warehousing of data. It may have come some distance since then.
Crystal reports is useful in case we want to import data from data base . We can write queries in it but Google Charts require to be implemented in our application using code so crystal reports is better than Google Charts.
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.
It is a decent buy for specific departments in terms of reporting capabilities but updates and cost (frequent) demands are higher with the benefits offered.
So long as the requirements are not ever changing, with scheduling functionality, it's a handsome tool.
