Infor Birst vs. Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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.
$30,000
Per 20 Users Per Year
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Prism was a business intelligence software offering from Prism Skylabs. It is a discontinued product.N/A
Pricing
Infor BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Basic License
$30,000
Per 20 Users Per Year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Infor BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Infor BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Considered Both Products
Infor Birst
Chose Infor Birst
The ability to scale was the primary factor for our CIO's approval. The other products had solutions for scale, but Birst has the one we preferred. As an IoT company our CIO concentrates on products that will meet our requirements today and far into the future. The other …
Chose Infor Birst
We needed multi-tenancy, embedding, scalability and preferred a cloud solution that removed the need for us to manage upgrades.
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Infor BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
7.4
77 Ratings
10% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
8.0
1 Ratings
2% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports7.068 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.077 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.159 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
7.0
78 Ratings
15% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
5.7
1 Ratings
35% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.078 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.077 Ratings6.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages6.127 Ratings4.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration7.068 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
8.0
75 Ratings
4% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
8.0
1 Ratings
4% below category average
Publish to Web8.052 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.067 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning7.28 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.066 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
6.9
72 Ratings
16% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
7.3
1 Ratings
10% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.072 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.058 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Predictive Analytics5.833 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
8.3
72 Ratings
4% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
-
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 Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
5.0
54 Ratings
46% below category average
Prism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
-
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 BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Small Businesses
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition
TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition
TIBCO Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Infor BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(96 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(35 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
4.1
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.5
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(19 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 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 BirstPrism, by Prism Skylabs (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Infor
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.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
I really like to use Prism, compared to other software, for data analysis. It allows a quick "plug and play" of the data and is very tolerant of many data formats. I typically resort to other software only when I need a more specific statistical analysis, or if I need a graphically cleaner visualization.
Read full review
Pros
Infor
  • 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.
  • Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • Data manipulations
  • Data visualization
  • Ease of use
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
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • Need a stronger interface with R
  • Advanced analysis is difficult to use
  • Graphically clumsy
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.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
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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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
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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Discontinued Products
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
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Infor
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.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
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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Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
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.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Infor
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.
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Discontinued Products
Excel would be the next best thing to use. It is free for the academic lab to use though the quality of the figure is lacking and not standardized. Excel also lacks easy to use built-in formulas for data manipulation and can be tedious to replicate the same data Prism can do with a single click.
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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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Discontinued Products
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.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • Excellent figures for publications
Read full review
ScreenShots

Infor Birst Screenshots

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