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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

    Syncfusion Essential Studio

    Score7.3 out of 10
    N/ASince 2002, Essential Studio® has supported the development of software applications across industries and economic sectors, in both public and private enterprises.

    $0

    with the Syncfusion Essential Studio Community License. It includes free access to all 1,600+ controls and is available to companies and individuals with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue and 5 or fewer developers.

    Pricing
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    1. Syncfusion Essential Studio Community License
    $0
    *The Syncfusion Essential Studio Community License includes free access to all 1,600+ controls and is available to companies and individuals with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue, 5 or fewer developers, and 10 or fewer total employees. Note: An entity or organization may not have ever received more than $3,000,000 USD in capital from an outside source, such as private equity or venture capital, in order to be eligible for the Community License.
    2. Essential Studio UI Edition
    Custom Quote
    per year Packages to suit teams of all sizes
    3. Essential Studio Document SDK
    Custom Quote
    per year Packages to suit teams of all sizes
    5. Essential Studio Standalone Document SDKs
    Custom Quote
    per year PDF Viewer SDK; DOCX Editor SDK; Spreadsheet Editor SDK
    4. Essential Studio Standalone UI SDKs
    Custom Quote
    per year Grid SDK*; Chart SDK*; Schedular SDK; Gantt SDK; Rich Text Editor SDK; Diagram SDK; File Manager SDK*
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—*Grid SDK, Chart SDK, and File Manager SDK are also included as part of the Essential Studio UI Edition. **The Syncfusion Essential Studio Community License includes free access to all 1,600+ controls and is available to companies and individuals with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue, 5 or fewer developers, and 10 or fewer total employees. Note: An entity or organization may not have ever received more than $3,000,000 USD in capital from an outside source, such as private equity or venture capital, in order to be eligible for the Community License.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    Considered Both Products
    Infor
    Chose Infor Birst
    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" …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    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 …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    A platform to speed up development and also to provide self-service analytics to our customers.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We compared Birst vs Tableau and Lumirra and there's no question that Birst is the best option from a cost perspective. Additionally, the ease of use complemented with our support team has allowed us to innovate on the platform quickly
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst's ETL is better suited to our purposes than Alooma's stream-based processing.
    Birst's designer is more mature and meets or needs better than Periscope's reporting functionality, at the time I investigated it.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    The key evaluation criteria: agility, ROI, short implementation time
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We use other BI tools within the organization. These tools have been there before we got BIRST and while comparing, BIRST did score well against these tools but the migration cost to convert existing reports/data prevented us from replacing those tools with BIRST.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We have realized over the years that our core competency is not in the area of building, updating and maintaining a BI suite. While the insights we provided with our homegrown solution worked for our clients, we have come to the realization that our customers were expecting …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Both Tableau and Qlik needed back end data preparation done before they could start. BIRST has that full process integrated. Most importantly, BIRST's fully integrated stack (we chose the cloud option) allows you to focus on delivering what your organization needs, without …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    - Great could solution.
    - Modern UI for Dashboards.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst have the ability to pull a huge amount of data with rendering/processing of data quickly. Birst is the finest cloud based BI tool I have seen.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We selected Birst due to the amount of time it takes to go from implementation to live usage. Most BI tools take a lot of time to create the data warehouse prior to creating useful reports. Birst, however, does not take much time at all. Also, Birst does not take a large BI …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Five years ago when we were researching our BI options, we considered Pentaho and Jaspersoft.
    No comparison, as they were more programmatic centered and also involved independent modules, so would require multiple components for a total solution.
    In the first hour of testing …
    Chose Infor Birst
    Tableau is the leader in visualizations, from animation to ease of use, it takes the cake. But they do not (did not) have the data modeling capabilities that were offered with Birst. The step back in visualizations from Birst is more than made up for in their modeling. Qlik is …
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst is the complete solution for us. The ETL, Data Warehouse, Dashboard and pixel reports was the main features we were looking for.
    Chose Infor Birst

    QlikView - on the face, similar system design, agnostic data sources,
    Cognos - previous experience
    MS Reporting Services - fit with internal systems/tools/environment.

    Chose Infor Birst
    Business Objects, Microsoft, Pentaho, JasperReports, GoodData. Birst provided the broadest set of functionality at the best cost of ownership. Ease of implementation and getting quickly up to speed provided the biggest cost savings vs the other packages. The keys to ease of …
    Syncfusion
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    29 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    28 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    29 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    25 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    Features
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Infor Birst and Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.4
    77 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.0
    78 Ratings
    13% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.0
    75 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    6.9
    72 Ratings
    15% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.3
    72 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 Syncfusion Essential Studio
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    5.0
    54 Ratings
    43% below category average
    Syncfusion Essential Studio
    -
    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 BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    Small Businesses
    Cyfe
    Score4 out of 10
    Progress Kendo UI
    Score8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Qlik Cloud Analytics (Qlik Sense)
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Progress Telerik
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Jaspersoft Community Edition
    Score7 out of 10
    Progress Telerik
    Score9.4 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.5
    (99 ratings)
    8.8
    (31 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (35 ratings)
    8.2
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    8.5
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    4.1
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    7.5
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.0
    (19 ratings)
    8.3
    (4 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.3
    (6 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    6.0
    (24 ratings)
    4.9
    (2 ratings)
    Data Sources
    7.6
    (76 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Infor BirstSyncfusion Essential Studio
    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
    Syncfusion
    The datagrid is probably their most popular control I would think. It is so flexible and configurable. Most of mine are plain views in ASP.NET Core, but I have a whole bunch that are dynamically created at runtime in my controller. That is so powerful.
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    • Integrates well into Microsoft tech stack. i.e. ASP.NET, Blazor etc. So it acts as a plug-n-play, which is great!
    • Shrinks the development cycle without adding too much of its own ecosystem overhead.
    • Provides different UI skins so the controls don't appear as "stitched".
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    • Sometimes links point to dead addresses in the documentation.
    • Some components have a difficult learning curve but that is usually due to the complexity of the control.
    • Minor version changes introduce breaking changes, for example updating from 20.1.x to 20.2.x gives us licensing errors, which in my opinion is a kind of breaking change as it requires all users to update their licenses.
    • Theming with CSS variables is not possible. Access to Theme Studio code is not possible. So a fully custom solution is needed to make Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition components themeable with CSS variables.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    It takes effort to include a new component library into existing software, especially in our case where we have 5 large applications that are written and maintained by about 100 developers. So changing such a core thing comes with a lot of effort. The other reason we will very likely renew our use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition is that it works really well and has helped us to speed up the development process.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    I would rate Syncfusion® Essential Studio® a 10 out of 10 for overall usability. The components are intuitive to implement, with clear APIs and consistent design patterns across the suite. This makes it easy for developers to get started quickly and reduces the learning curve even when working with new controls.
    In addition, the documentation and sample projects provide practical guidance that helps accelerate development. The built-in customization options also allow us to adapt the components to fit our branding and business requirements without excessive effort. Overall, the usability is one of the key reasons why Syncfusion has become an essential part of our development toolset.
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    Although I have decades of software development experience, I had never created a website from scratch before, and my html and css skills are not particularly strong. Between documentation and incredible dedication from the support team they helped me overcome all of my challenges. It's amazing that they typically create sample code for most of the issues that I submitted. On rare occasions where I uncovered a defect they kept me informed as to its status, and typically resolved it in a short-term release, and/or gave me a reasonable workaround. They hopped on zoom calls with me on multiple occasions when necessary.
    Read full review
    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.
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    No answers on this topic
    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.
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    Feedback from the team has been very positive.
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    Firstly, there is a free version for small businesses and it allows you to jump start without risk. I found one of the other products a bit short in the number of out-of-the-box supported events handlers for each control and, although you can manually add them, I feel more comfortable to just have them ready. After using the free version I just felt in love with Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls and decided to stay with them; they have all I need and more. The usage of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition controls is straightforward and intuitive. Support is world-class even for the free version; you get answers in 24 hours at most. Also, the support team is ready to remotely connect to your project in case it is needed; we have had one situation like this, and the issue was solved.
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Read full review
    Syncfusion
    • First of all, I think the best positive impact is the reduce of time development. I do not know exactly how much time, but certainly, using the framework we save a lot of effort and time.
    • About negative impact, sometimes using the controls of the framewrok have a signifcant impact in the execution time and page load.
    • And of course, the use of Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition has a significant impact of the learning of javascript and JQUERY.
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Infor Birst Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    Syncfusion Essential Studio Screenshots

    Screenshot of An overview of Syncfusion® Essential Studio®, which is a software package that includes more than 1,600 components and frameworks for WinForms, WPF, ASP.NET (Web Forms, MVC, Core), UWP, WinUI, Flutter, Blazor, JavaScript, Angular, Vue, and React.Screenshot of The DataGrid control, which is a grid component that helps display and manipulate large amounts of data in a tabular format. Its feature set includes functionalities like data binding, sorting, grouping, editing, filtering, swiping, dragging, resizing, loading more items, pull-to-refresh, and exporting to Excel and PDF file formats.Screenshot of The PDF Viewer, which is .NET PDF class library developed with 100% managed C# code that can be used to create, read, and write PDFs.