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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Infor Birst

    Score6.5 out of 10
    N/AInfor 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.N/A

    Blackbaud Luminate Online

    Score6.8 out of 10
    Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
    Luminate Online aims to help non-profits engage more effectively with supporters and raise more money by enabling integrated campaigns for digital, social and mobile channels. According to the vendor, Luminate Online helps non-profits: Better understand online supporters Make the right ask at the right time Launch creative fundraising campaigns Automated campaigns stimulate engagement and action through targeted welcome messages with personalized…N/A
    Pricing
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeRequired
    Additional Details—Luminate Online is priced based on the number of email addresses on file, modules used and service plan. Our peer to peer offering, TeamRaiser, has a transactional, shared success pricing model.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Considered Both Products
    Infor
    No answer on this topic
    Blackbaud
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    57%
    Would buy again
    4 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    50%
    Delivers good value for the price
    3 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    71%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.4
    77 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Pixel Perfect reports7.068 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.077 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.159 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.0
    78 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Drill-down analysis8.078 Ratings00 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities7.077 Ratings00 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages6.127 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration7.068 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.0
    75 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Publish to Web8.052 Ratings00 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.067 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Versioning7.28 Ratings00 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling9.066 Ratings00 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    6.9
    72 Ratings
    15% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.072 Ratings00 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.058 Ratings00 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics5.833 Ratings00 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.3
    72 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Multi-User Support (named login)9.070 Ratings00 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model8.068 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.069 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Infor Birst and Blackbaud Luminate Online
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    5.0
    54 Ratings
    43% below category average
    Blackbaud Luminate Online
    -
    Ratings
    Responsive Design for Web Access7.052 Ratings00 Ratings
    Mobile Application3.034 Ratings00 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile3.042 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    Bonterra Network for Good
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Zendesk Explore
    Score8.1 out of 10
    GiveSmart by Momentive
    Score7.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    Kindsight iWave
    Score8.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.5
    (99 ratings)
    3.7
    (87 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (35 ratings)
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    2.1
    (28 ratings)
    Availability
    4.1
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    7.5
    (6 ratings)
    9.2
    (9 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.0
    (19 ratings)
    5.0
    (32 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.3
    (14 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.3
    (6 ratings)
    3.0
    (4 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    6.6
    (9 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    6.0
    (24 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sources
    7.6
    (76 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.8
    (11 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Infor BirstBlackbaud Luminate Online
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Blackbaud
    Blackbaud Luminate Online is an excellent solution for online giving, providing a wealth of tools for producing donation forms. It also is outstanding for peer-to-peer fundraising, such as event-based efforts like walks, cycling tours, and so forth. The Email module is outstanding if you need an internal solution for communicating with your donors and supporters. It provides a wealth of tools for crafting emails, and for reporting on the results.
    Read full review
    Pros
    Infor
    • 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
    Incentivized
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    Blackbaud
    • House Donor Information. Easy report pulling. Queries and lists.
    • I like how everything is housed on one platform. Webpages, emails and donor profiles. User friendly.
    • It works nicely with other blackbaud products such as Raiser's Edge. Easy importing and exporting options.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Infor
    • 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
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    Blackbaud
    • Reporting needs some work, this is being worked on in their new BETA program.
    • The eCommerce module needs some work. It would be great to have more ability to customize parts of it without having to rewrite the code.
    • The Events module could use some improvements as well.
    • The Personal Fundraising module needs a lot of work. It really cannot work as needed right now. We started using TeamRaiser to handle this, but it could be great.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Infor
    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.
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    Blackbaud
    We’ve decided to leave Luminate and are moving to a system that better caters to our and our users needs. Luminate has proven difficult to use and has limited abilities when it comes to data management, events, and peer-to-peer functionality. Reporting is also very complicated and requires a great deal of time to utilize properly.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Infor
    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.
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    Blackbaud
    You have to be very tech savvy to use Luminate to its fullest potential. You can get buy with the training, but there is a steep learning curve and you almost need 6 months to 1 year of in-person training to really be able to anything substantial. The online training lessons are not going to cut it while learning this program.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Infor
    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
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    Blackbaud
    It's a very rare occurrence if the system isn't available when I want it. I can easily log in from home after hours if need be, and the security is enforced, but simple when you're legit! They are very good about sending email reminders and updates when system maintenance will be performed, and it's always during middle of the night hours when you likely wouldn't be using it anyways
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Infor
    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
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    Blackbaud
    Pages load fast and 98% of the reports do run in a matter of secons/minutes. There is this one report I have that can take hours to run, but this is due to the amount of transactions being requested for one of our biggest online fundraising events (Transaction report)
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Infor
    • Poor turnaround time
    • Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
    • Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
    • Lack of inter team work noticed
    • Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time
    Incentivized
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    Blackbaud
    Support staff are usually incredibly helpful and responsive. There are several ways to contact them (chat, logging a ticket, phone) which makes it easy to get help when you need it. Once in a while I get a support staff member who isn't quite as helpful, which is why I gave it a 9 instead of a 10, but that is rare and if I follow up with someone else, I get what I need.
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Infor
    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.
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    Blackbaud
    Initial training was great and the instructor was very patient and helpful during the set up process. Blackbaud has a variety on online self-paced classes that supplement the training you receive. The only downfall is after training is complete. I've found the support for Luminate to be a tad lackluster. We often encounter issues that aren't on Luminate's development road map and have had a series of cases be opened.
    Incentivized
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    Online Training
    Infor
    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.
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    Blackbaud
    When I used the training, I had actually been using Luminate Online but figured it might help me learn to use the tools more effectively. And it did. The sessions were helpful and even as a current user I felt like I learned how to use the tools more effectively.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Infor
    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.
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    Blackbaud
    Implementation of Luminate itself was rather smooth, but the process involved for TeamRaiser was very difficult. Even after implementation we relied on support to help with various aspects of TeamRaiser from page design to reporting and front end user issues. The support offered for issues with Luminate was very good, but again TeamRaiser support was lacking.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Infor
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Blackbaud
    The only other product I have used for this type of fundraising work is NetCommunity and it hasn't been as scalable or versatile. It doesn't really offer the peer to peer fundraising of Luminate or the constituent management, web page development and considered donation forms. NetCommunity didn't even come close which is why we replaced it with Luminate.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Infor
    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
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    Blackbaud
    Luminate Online is a great scalable product as it provides various price points dependent on your quantity of email addresses. This allows both small and large organizations to utilize the product, which has strong email capabilities. It also means smaller organizations aren't forced to pay astronomical fees in order to have access to a quality product.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Infor
    • 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
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    Blackbaud
    • We've increased our online giving +200% although this is due in part to our focus on the channel and not entirely on the product.
    • We've been able to increase employee efficiency by selecting email lists per message within Luminate Online. With our prior solution we needed to request data be pulled from our database for event email.
    • We've really done a great job of growing our online tribute and memorial giving through the use of custom links and the pre-populated information has really helped with the back end processing.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Infor Birst Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Blackbaud Luminate Online Screenshots

    Screenshot of Email Overview DashboardScreenshot of Luminate allows you to enable multiple types of giving - from recurring to matching and everything between.Screenshot of Luminate enables you to reach out to supporters in multiple waysScreenshot of Luminate Peer to Peer fundraising with DIY events, also enables your supporters to fundraising on their behalf.