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Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, …
Starting at $30,000 Per 20 Users Per Year
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What is Infor Birst?
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,…
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Popular Features
- Drill-down analysis (78)8.080%
- Customizable dashboards (77)8.080%
- Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (72)8.080%
- Formatting capabilities (77)7.070%
Pricing
Basic License
$30,000
On Premise
Per 20 Users Per Year
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://bit.ly/2n6VznO
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Extending Analytics in CloudSuite Distribution - Demo
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Analytics Anytime, Anywhere - Birst Mobile Demo
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Automated Data Refinement in Infor Birst - Demo
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Best Practices For Increasing Adoption of Analytics - Demo
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Infor Birst How-To Series – Connecting to Databases
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What is Infor Birst?
Infor Birst is a BI product that enables a single view of data and eliminate data silos. Additionally, decentralized teams and individual users can augment this shared analytic fabric with their own local data, without compromising data governance. This consistency comes from a unified semantic layer, which maintains common definitions and key metrics, no matter where users sit.
Birst achieves Networked BI through a 2-tier architecture that aligns back-end enterprise data with line-of-business or local, edge data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source (data stores, applications, warehouses, big data, and unstructured external sources) into a unified semantic layer. The result is a consistent view that enables users with self-service analytics through dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.
Birst goes to market in two primary ways:
- Direct, for enterprises using Birst for analytics on internal data to drive improved business outcomes
- Embedded, for all size companies who offer data (analytics) products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products
Birst’s product is packaged in 3 available formats:
- Platform and per-user fee
- By Department or Business Unit
- By end-customer (for embedded scenarios)
Infor Birst Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Windows App
- Supported: Administration via MacOS App
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: In-memory data model
- Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
- Supported: ETL Capability
- Supported: ETL Scheduler
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: ODBC
- Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
- Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: IBM Netezza
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: ParAccel
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: SAP
- Supported: Google Analytics
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Predictive modeling
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
- Supported: Predictive Analytics
- Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Infor Birst Screenshots
Infor Birst Videos
Infor Birst Competitors
Infor Birst Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android, Mobile Web |
| Supported Countries | All |
| Supported Languages | Arabic, English, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Spanish |
Infor Birst Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Alteryx, InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued), and Datameer are common alternatives for Infor Birst.
Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling and Multi-User Support (named login) highest, with a score of 9.
The most common users of Infor Birst are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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(186)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, Accounting, and HR departments rely on Birst to establish a single source of truth and move away from individual definitions of data. Zalora, for example, utilizes Birst as their primary tool for self-service data needs, including data extraction for operational purposes and simple ad-hoc analysis. The fulfillment center employs Birst to track item or product level KPIs, while the marketing teams make use of Birst Live data and dashboards to monitor campaign sales and discounts. Birst integrates with various data sources like Google Analytics, event tracking, operational data, and sales data through a separate data warehouse. By distributing reports and dashboards across the company for viewing, Birst serves as an enterprise-wide BI visualization and distribution platform that supports different revenue models while providing reporting automation, visualization, and distribution capabilities. Furthermore, Birst is embedded into cloud-based software provided to customers, enabling the monitoring of software utilization and tracking of marketing campaigns. Salesforce users benefit from BIRST Dashboards integrated into Salesforce pages as it provides sales analytics and pipeline tracking. The time-to-delivery advantage offered by Birst was one of the reasons it was chosen by many organizations. It allows for simple gathering of company-wide data streams without the need for manual data warehouse construction or report building. With Birst's robust features, it is used across various industries and departments such as SCM & Operations teams, Sales teams, partners, finance, marketing, product management, clinical data analysis in hospitals, education institutions for measuring performance effectiveness and much more. Overall, Birst fulfills a wide range of use cases and enables businesses to analyze data effectively and gain valuable insights to drive informed decision-making throughout the organization.
Highly versatile and user-friendly: Users have found Birst to be a highly versatile and user-friendly business intelligence tool. They appreciate the intuitive user interface, which makes tasks easy to perform. Many reviewers have mentioned that even users with limited technical skills can quickly navigate the platform and start using its features effectively.
Knowledgeable and proactive support: Many users highly value the knowledgeable and proactive support provided by Birst. The support team is responsive and helpful in providing excellent guidance. Reviewers have expressed satisfaction with their interactions with the support team, highlighting their expertise in resolving issues promptly.
Customizable user interface: Users appreciate the customizable user interface of Birst, which allows them to tailor the platform to their changing business needs. The flexibility of the interface is seen as a major advantage by several reviewers who mention being able to personalize dashboards, reports, and visualizations according to their specific requirements.
Confusing User Interface: Users have found the user interface of Birst to be perplexing and not user-friendly. Some reviewers have mentioned that it has a steep learning curve and lacks proper organization and categorization of custom expressions.
Lack of Support from Technical Team: Several users expressed frustration with the lack of support from Birst's technical team. They reported difficulties in reaching them over the phone and dissatisfaction with their insistence on scheduling calls even after submitting detailed tickets.
Difficult Data Modeling Process: Users encountered challenges with data modeling in Birst, especially for those who were new to the platform. The ETL tools were described as inadequate, leading some users to rely on alternative platforms for data warehousing.
Users commonly recommend Birst for its intuitive and effective business intelligence and data analysis capabilities. They attribute Birst as a comprehensive solution with a low total cost of ownership. Additionally, users suggest Birst for its cloud-based central BI solutions, emphasizing their focus on security and scalability. Another frequently mentioned recommendation is Birst's top-notch visualization capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking advanced data visualization tools. Users also find Birst to be highly capable and user-friendly, highlighting its excellent analytics and AI capabilities.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(26-50 of 96)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 09, 2018
Birst: a whole in one reporting platform.
We are using birst in the international part of our logistics company. It is used across different departments. In the beginning it was used for sales and marketing but going forward we also provide information to finance and operations. Information is spread by using dashboards, scheduled reports and ad hoc reports. The information we provide via Birst is about client performance, quality of our service, year over year financial analysis and more.
Our current challenge is to implement a near real time reporting on our service in order to be proactive and to keep the degree of service at a high level.
Our current challenge is to implement a near real time reporting on our service in order to be proactive and to keep the degree of service at a high level.
- It's rather easy to create a datamodel once you understand some basic rules.
- Development can go pretty fast. Defining the input are more or less straightforward SQL queries, actually called BQL. Transforming input to output can be simple and straightforward but also complex problems can be solved.
- The ad hoc report creation in visualizer is very convenient and easy to use. If needed a powerful formula can be created in order to transform existing attributes or measures. The editor to create those formulas has evolved from a basic one to an editor using type-ahead and lookups.
- Dashboard creation is a piece of cake and the use of the dashboard with filtering,drill through and slice and dice is pretty straightforward and intuitive.
- Birst is spending a lot of effort in the frontend and creating a product which will allow more and more self service for the end user. Nothing wrong with that wouldn't it be that in the backend, the admin part, some effort could be used to improve efficiency and usability.
- Using a cloud application is both a good and a bad thing. When problems occur we sometimes wish to get more insight in the blackbox under the hood of Birst, actually the database with the physical tables. Fortunately the cloud solution offers us still more advantages than drawbacks.
- Some powerusers like to get a whole lot of data so they can do some number crunching in their favorite spreadsheet. But Birst doesn't always fit this need as getting big chunks of data out of the system can be pretty inconvenient.
March 09, 2018
A very powerful BI tool
We use Birst for a range of reporting, primarily around sales. We have 200 Birst users across most departments in the company. We use Birst for sales performance against sales targets, comparative sales reporting (this year vs last year etc) and sales analysis. We also use it for Discount analysis and sales commission calculations
- Visualization capabilities are good
- Having a datawarehouse is very important
- Generally the end user experience is good
- Performance could always be better
- We don't allow end users to develop their own dashboards and reports. Too much risk that they might accidentaly change something they shouldn't
March 09, 2018
Pulse Analytics use of Birst - Review March 2018
We selected Birst to provide Pulse Analytics a vehicle to produce and deploy our Analytics products. We offer Pulse Analytics to industries that require process analysis such as mining, manufacturing, construction and transport (for example).
Birst allows us to connect to just about any data source and transform that data into meaningful, dynamic dashboards that allow our users to be informed and make decisions based on empirical evidence. We are also able to deploy our offerings very quickly due to the Birst architecture (such as being cloud-based).
Birst allows us to connect to just about any data source and transform that data into meaningful, dynamic dashboards that allow our users to be informed and make decisions based on empirical evidence. We are also able to deploy our offerings very quickly due to the Birst architecture (such as being cloud-based).
- Single tool from raw data to end user interface.
- Cloud deployment means quick to get to new clients, and can be accessed from anywhere on almost any device.
- Powerful back end (Admin Module) allows for flexible data transforms and process flows.
- A wider array of user interface components (e.g. more chart types).
- More reliable servers that are providing the end user experience.
- Better documentation and user guides.
March 08, 2018
Birst for all
BIRST is being used mainly by Sales, Finance and Accounting teams. We have embedded BIRST Dashboards into Salesforce pages as well as created dedicated dashboard tabs within Salesforce.com for single sign on. Dashboards and Reports built on BIRST mainly serve for Pipeline and Sales Analytics. Due to the nature of BIRST's unique offering (BI+Database on Cloud), we are able to expand and propose various solutions using BIRST. We are also constantly working towards migrating various silo solutions that are built on Excel/MS-Access into BIRST platform.
- Competitive pricing for the features that are offered: We use various two other BI tools for operational reporting and we always have challenges of expanding it for larger audience due to the licensing cost. BIRST scores very well in the pricing department, with 1/5th of the price compared to other tools, this is an easy decision maker to recommend BIRST.
- Being in Cloud: The strength of BIRST is that the product features that are made available but requires zero installation and administration. The overall support resources needed to maintain and manage the application has drastically come down.
- Ease of use and integration with other data sources: Senior management leaders need quite a lot of information, in an easily readable format without having to go into multiple places. With Dashboard 2.0 and Visualizer, the contents now can be presented very intuitively and visually appealing. Users can also subscribe for certain reports to be delivered at various intervals. With multiple data connectivity options, we have successfully integrated many core systems under one single reporting umbrella.
- Better MS-Office Integration: Almost all the Business users have invested in MS-Office products such as Excel, Word and Powerpoint. Currently there is very limited options available for taking data from BIRST and making it to work with these products. More export options would be a welcome feature among these users. Also the ability to connect to BIRST and refresh/download certain reports through excel would be very helpful.
- Powerful Report Designer: The current version of Designer and Visualizer lack certain features to create Complex reports. Few examples are, ability to create multiple tables in a report, link data from two or more queries and be able to show as one data, templates, free style reports rather than just using different bands etc. A light weight client tool for designer reports will help in faster turn around development time as the current web based interface is slow in designing reports for customized layout options.
- Custom forms / write ability: Dashboard 2.0 has evolved greatly. If custom forms can be created for users to enter certain inputs, this will make Dashboards even more interactive. Just a wish list.
- Live connectivity to Salesforce.com: This will be a very good feature to introduce especially for Sales team. We have been asked at least 1000 times if there is a way to make the data more live or real time.
March 07, 2018
Birst Review
We use it embedded in our product. I find it very hard to use for our purposes. It's great for a user who doesn't have a computer programming background to set up custom reports and dashboards, but for someone who does it's missing a lot of basic functionality.
- Ease of use for non-technically inclined users
- Nice UI
- No ability to do a basic left join. I've never used a BI tool that can't support such basic functionality.
- Column sorting is broken all over the place. Trying to sort by a datetime, for example, does not work the way it should and shows things out of order.
- I find it slow and clunky to use.
- Many options can be unclear in the UI as to what they do.
March 06, 2018
Birst Review
We use birst as platform for our analytics product and sell our analytics product to our customer which is a cancer hospital. We use Birst to perform clinical data dta analysis on patient treatment data collected by hospitals. We distribute our analytics product hosted on our cloud environment which is developed on the Birst platform.
- Birst has a very good UI dashboard module.
- Visualizer module to explore explore data is very to learn and use, especially for less tech savvy people.
- Birst connect to upload data which provides push mechanism from source system.
- Birst has lot of bugs, need to improve on quality.
- Birst Modeling layer is difficulty to pick up
- ETL functionality is very limited and difficult to work with
Birst is used across my organization, but particularly by the sales and marketing departments. It is used to track pipeline flow from impressions to revenue.
- Birst's SQL-like language is conveniently familiar for experienced developers
- Birst integrates well with Salesforce and external CSV data sources.
- Birst's support staff is reasonably responsive, if not always able to provide a satisfactory result.
- Birst contains several sub-systems with similar, but signifcantly incompatible, syntax and functionalities. This leads to confusion and difficulty.
- Birst provides insufficient control over how charts are rendered and how dashboard prompts are displayed and used. This has lead to significant dissatisfaction on the part of those for whom I've developed dashboards.
- Significant parts of Birst resemble a relational database, but cannot be made to function like one. This results in jumping through complicated hoops to construct the fact tables for a multiple-relation data system.
February 28, 2018
Birst Review
We leverage Birst in two ways. First, it is the access point into one of our turnkey analytics environments. The second use is as a white-labeled solution for our operational reporting. The second use case is being leveraged by both internal resources as well as clients.
- Birst has proven itself to be easy to navigate for business users.
- Birst provides the flexibility to provide multiple views so clients can easily consume the insights how they prefer to view them.
- Birst has allowed us to "productize" portions of our business intelligence offerings.
- We really haven't run into any large areas for improvement. The roadblocks we have encountered have been resolved with the help of Birst.
February 28, 2018
Birsting w/ Data Analytics!
We use Birst to run the majority of our KPI's for the company. We continue to expand the use of Birst on many fronts to ensure we have the proper business analytics and data in front of our teams for key decision making and business performance monitoring. Birsat has enabled us to all speak to the same set of data and information!
- Ability to have drill down capability
- Real time metrics and dashboards
- Ability to "Birst" out reports to email distribution lists
- Stability of the system seems tp have worsened over the last few 6 months.
- Enhanced graphing capability
February 21, 2018
Birst debunked.
Birst is being used in multiple departments across the organization. Zalora is an eCommerce company with data touching all the departments. Birst is now primarily used as a data extraction tool for operational purposes, hence it's our primary tool for self-service data needs. Birst is also used by several departments for simple ad-hoc analysis. Birst is primarily used by the fulfillment center to know item or product level KPIs. Birst Live data and dashboards were used for a long time to track marketing campaign sales and discounts. Until recently we shifted to other platforms as we needed more real-time analytics. Traditionally birst sufficed most of the business problems and use cases, however due to the technological transformations we had to pivot our platform to other alternatives.
- Birst is a cloud based BI platform and hence all our data is hosted on the cloud platform. Zalora had lot of data users who used to query the database, all these loads where shifted to birst and helped our in-house databases to function smoothly and concentrate on other critical processes.
- Birst report scheduling functionality has been very useful for our company. reports are scheduled to emails to several operational heads to help them monitor action items and help to improve our operational KPIs.
- Birst has been flexible with the number of users who can access the tool. Most of the BI platforms currently charges companies based on the users who would use the BI tool.
- Birst is useful in performing time based KPIs such as YoY, WoW, MoM, Qtr-o-Qtr etc. There are several functions available which helps to perform time based calculation.
- Birst is very useful in performing aggregations at different level (and different dates) as its based on star schema.
- As all the reports are in cloud, birst reports can be easily shared with one another and acts as a report repository
- Birst helps to maintain single source of truth and helps enforce standardized definitions for all our KPIs
- Visualizer report rendering is of high quality and quite fast for simple data requests and pull
- Birst provides snapshot functionality which is extensively used in our company to maintain the price logs and changes of all our merchandise.
- Birst being a cloud based platform is a both a blessing and a curse. as the data scales the performance of the tool deteriorates. although simple KPI reports can be quickly obtained, load intensive functions such as STAT or LET becomes hard to perform.
- The customer service is rather poor when the problems at hand are tough. The turnaround time for some of the bigger problems can go on for months without an alternative solution
- The processing time for each space is not consistent. outside US servers the processing time is very time consuming. Our APAC spaces in birst gets updated data by afternoon of a working day.
- The scheduled reports might not come in time if the server is busy. We have had instance in which the scheduled reports would come a whole 24 hours later than the scheduled time.
- Birst is a very difficult setup for change. If the data in the company is changing constantly then birst is not the tool to be held with. after implementing best practices, we were able to bring down the processing time of birst live to max 25 mins.
- When the size of the data scales, powerful functions such as STAT (bring data at a different level and aggregates in the report) and LET are hard to perform. We have had instance in which STAT would run for more than an hour to render reports
- Birst designer are still in FLASH and the vizualiser which is in HTML5 lacks several critical functions like scheduling, notifications, saving expressions and managing them. this leaves the customer to use the designer module instead of the vizualiser module, however the support for designer has been removed without keeping in mind that the visualizer component is incomplete.
- Plug n play analytics is hard to perform unless you have certain technical knowledge. Data in flat files or excel files cannot be analyzed or visualized instantly like it can be done in Tableau or any other BI Platform.
- External Inputs cannot be made on the report. External parameters and data cannot be blended with the existing report. For example, if we had to increase our discounts by x% how much would our sales be? these kind of questions are hard to perform.
- The syntax of each module in birst is different. This shows lack of team work within birst. for example. In designer module the ubiquitous if statement is denoted by IF and in Admin it is denoted by IIF. this would lead to end user being confused.
- Certain important critical functions such as Report bursting, querying sample data and parameterized reporting are available only to the admins and not the end users.
- Most of the code change requests in customer service tickets are still pending to date and some of them are unresolved.
- Birst has quite a bit of learning curve as it has its own syntax. one would need to be educated to understand the different types of expressions which exist in birst.
- Birst lacks search functionality in designer and searching in visualizer is rather tedious if you have several KPI named similarly
- The Pivot Control functionality is rather poor and pathetically mimics the pivot of excel
- Advance analytics is not possible. Different statistical models cannot be implemented. this would require data to be pumped out to perform advance analytics
- The Tableau-Birst connect is limited to 500GB, hence if the data scales the ODBC connector would not be useful
- The Data logs thrown out by birst needs to be more intutive and detailed. this would help new users to better understand the problems and troubleshoot it effectively
- Usage tracking of birst is tedious which would require a separate space to be created just to track users.
- Renewal costs are expensive given the price per BI Platform is coming down in recent years with more and more products coming online.
The product is used as a client-facing reporting tool to track travel spend. It is also used in two internal client groups to track vendor commission income and payment collection, as well as for meetings and events groups.
- Easily deployable. The stand up of the product was easy and one of the reasons we went with it.
- Unnecessary complexity -- Birst seems to make even the basic things overly complicated -- for example, schema and table names. Schema names are horrendously long hexa character names with zero logic build into the naming convention. Same with the table names. Aside from some standard appellations like DW, it creates these fact tables and adds random numbers to the end. All this makes it way more complicated than it needs to be when running queries or developing (and I'm even forgiving the need to add a $ after every column name when querying!).
- Space - schema and data proliferation seems out of ordinary. Again, the complexity of what Birst does in the backend that is the reasoning for so much proliferation is so esoteric that it takes a $185/hr Birst data modeler to really understand it.
- Lack of version control - due to the nature of how Birst is structured, it's necessary to create multiple spaces to support the same product. But none of these spaces are linked - everything has to be manually copied over. And there is zero concept of version control within the Birst eco system. That all has to be done manually and is very prone to error, time consuming, and not what one would expect of an enterprise level product at all.
- Horrible product support after the initial phases of the project. When you are paying their consultants full time at $185/hr then everyone in the organization is eager to help and you are so important. Once you go solo and the product is embedded in the organizationnce they have you as a client you are no longer important. We have product issues that have been open for over a year and still have not been resolved. If we don't complain loud and long and continue complaining, they will ignore us. Additionally, they are reluctant to accept some of their shortcomings as genuine bugs or missed features, and that puts the fixes on low priority on their end.
- Overp romises and under delivers - we have had to practically abandon the feature that is supposed to be our big product differentiator because Birst promised they could deliver what we needed, and after three years and a horrible low -tech design that was nothing like what they originally proposed, we have gotten so tired of hounding them to make good on their promise we've just accepted they don't care and never will.
- Not a modern enterprise solution - processing large amounts of data takes a huge, burdensome amount of time. Dashboard and report functionality are sub-par (i.e. text sizing was a huge issue and took a year and a half for them to even address). Visuals are not appealing. There is a huge lack of flexibility in the presentation of the tool (they don't even have the ability to sort filters other than alphabetically -- though I hear that may have been fixed in a recent release - three years later). We still can't alter the font size dynamically and our dashboards are not visually appealing. And we have to tell all of our users, inside and outside of the company, if they want our product to work right they have to use Chrome. A good solution would work great on any platform.
February 16, 2018
Birst at its Best
Birst is used across the organisation and by our business partners. It is embedded into the product. It's a powerful tool which gives them the vision for their devices, how devices are getting used by their end customers, what properties and values are getting used frequently, the outliers and how to diagnose the problem, etc.
- Birst is a powerful tool for BI, it has various features built in which can be used directly by inheriting it instead of writing 1000 lines of code.
- It gives a way to demonstrate the numbers as various ways through its charts, which makes it easy for a non-IT person to see a trend.
- The access control gives you the ability to map users as per their use case and dataset.
- Some mathematical operations need real understanding of the functions like RSUM to get cumulative count.
- The UI has a scope of improvement. It can be made lighter.
- Product can be broken down into pieces and can be used as per the need, not all the features are useful for everyone.
February 16, 2018
Our first cloud Data Warehouse
[It's] Currently used by the sales org. We will expand this to finance, marketing and product management in the future.
- One stop shop for ETL | Data model | Visualization. No need to learn a new tool for each layer of the end to end BI process or find resources to manage layers.
- A perfect fit for a company of our size both in terms of head count and revenue.
- The library of functions that allow you to digress from the star schema is very useful. For every 5 reports we create, at least one of them will conflict with the dimensional model in place. These functions come in very handy in those situations.
- Advanced reporting is done using a feature called 'designer'. This is a reporting environment with a user experience that is stuck in the 90s. Its unfortunate that a modern BI tool that goes against the likes of looker and tableau has not put any effort to consolidate report creation into one env.
- Visualizations are very limited. We are able to answer most of the questions using a table, pie, bar or line charts. But a specific use case that shows customer share of wallet would have been a great fit for Gantt chart but not supported in birst.
- The things you can do to fancy up charts and tables are also very limited. For example, you cannot selectively display values for the line graph but turn it for the bars in the same chart. Conditional formatting is also very limited in nature.
- Performance can be very slow sometimes. We don't have a large volume of data - considering that, the reports don't render fast enough.
- The platform has more features set in ETL/data Model areas than in visualization.
February 15, 2018
BIRST is an ok MIS product not a high performance OEM product
BIRST is embedded in multiple products across Hobsons, it is used by several departments. The primary use is to provide insights into education institutional effectiveness in both high school and college level organizations. Where the end user is a member of staff of the institution and requires aggregate data on the performance of their organization be it at a district/campus /school or collective set of institutions.
- BIRST provides touch points through their customer account management teams to help you get to completion with your projects.
- BIRST has created a community for users to share solutions to problems with each other.
- BIRST has a desire to help organizations succeed.
- BIRST has a quality issue, many of the items delivered in the form of 'code-changes' are often not functioning correctly and existing features break between releases.
- Reduce the pace of releases until quality assurance is higher, each release costs customers significant amount of resources to test and report back what's broken.
- BIRST organizational structure often leaves account managers in the customer success group without insights into technology issues and release roadmaps. Frustrating customers who are waiting on fixes. Escalations are slow and take several quarters to be effective.
February 15, 2018
Birst Forward
Birst is currently used in four departments across our business and is being rolled out to all areas of the business over the coming months. Birst is an extremely effective tool for us to monitor and manage our stock turn and profitability, allowing us to drill down into any potential problem areas and resolve quickly and efficiently. It allows us to quickly visualise our current and historic stock and profit.
- Birst allows a wide range of users to quickly and easily see the information relating to their area of the business.
- The Birst app is very useful for our employees who do not always have access to their PC.
- Overall once a dashboard has been created, it is simple to filter and drill down into more detail for users who require more than the top line KVI.
- Reports set up in a crosstab or table are not very visual to look at, but I often find some reporting requirements cannot be displayed in a chart.
- I personally have found writing some of the custom expressions I require quite difficult to write, but the Birst community has been helpful.
February 15, 2018
Great solution for OEM/Embedded analytics
It is being embedded in a product to provide analytics capabilities.
- Consuming data from disparate data sources
- Enabling data blending between Trimble and customer data
- Displaying data in an intuitive manner
- Deploying code to multiple Birst regions
February 13, 2018
Birst Delivers as Promised!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Apex selected Birst to deliver product specific dashboards for our Industrial Dispensing, Asset Management, Real Time Retail and IT Service Management customers; approximately 10,000 globally.
As an IoT company Apex is on the cutting edge of providing our customers with the best BI to assist in product implementation and management. Birst works well for our customer base with fast development and deployment capabilities along with white labeling technologies.
In 2018 Apex released Lenz to our Customer base at the National Retail Federation convention in New York City. The release coincided with the release of upgrades to a number of our product lines. Lenz is not serving hundreds of Apex customer delivering insight into actionable data. This is a key differentiator for Apex saving time and money for our Customers.
As an IoT company Apex is on the cutting edge of providing our customers with the best BI to assist in product implementation and management. Birst works well for our customer base with fast development and deployment capabilities along with white labeling technologies.
In 2018 Apex released Lenz to our Customer base at the National Retail Federation convention in New York City. The release coincided with the release of upgrades to a number of our product lines. Lenz is not serving hundreds of Apex customer delivering insight into actionable data. This is a key differentiator for Apex saving time and money for our Customers.
- The ETL processes in Birst are exceptional. Birst builds our meta-data layer for us using Birst's proprietary technology.
- Birst uses "spaces" to build/test/deliver BI content. This is easy to work with and provides a management process for us to build dashboards based on specific sets of spaces. This reduces our maintenance effort as our IoT database changes.
- The support for Birst has been fantastic. Not that we have had to use it a great deal, but when we do both the online Birst Community and the contracted support have been spot on with their assistance.
- Birst white labeling capabilities have provided Apex with a means to name and trademark our BI applications.
- Birst Mobile has proven to be flexible and fast on iOS and Android platforms allowing Apex to move BI data from the desktop to the palm of the user's hand.
- The training has been moved online, but there is a separate fee for each module. As a heavy user of Birst the training should be a part of the package embedding the cost into the annual subscription. Requesting an additional Purchase Order for training is time consuming and raises questions by Management.
- The Visualizer tool is powerful and, as in any tool, we have a wish list of functional enhancements. The latest release, 5.29 provides significant additions voted up by the use community. If it isn't in Birst now, add it to the community and get it voted up!
- The initial roll out of Predictive Analytics is a nice conceptual start. Hopefully Birst will grow this area significantly in 2018.
- The white labeling feature could be enhanced to allow for customer based CSS control. As it is we cannot change page layouts forcing pages to appear less than visionary to our Customer base.
- Documentation on "how to" functionality has been missing throughout our time with Birst. Occasionally Birst pushes out a document or a Customer writes one posting it to the Community Site. Birst Help is a resource, but it often provides what is obvious and not what is required to implement a complex feature.
August 10, 2017
Birst a good tool for complex organisations
Birst is curerntly being used by Field Marketing to create reports and analytics. Currently the data is being imported from Salesforce and another systems and weekly fed into Birst. The tool allows us to create our detailed dashbords and reports but unfortunately, due to the manual process of importing the data, the numbers are not always 100% consistent.
- Complete tool
- Many options available
- Great degree of customization
- Data is imported manually in our organisation
- Some degree of difficulty
- Needs at least a permanent engineer to correctly mantain the system
August 03, 2017
Birst - Ready to go BI tool
We are using Birst for our complete BI practice. This tool takes care of ETL, database and data visualization. All the departments in our organization are entitled to a single BI tool which is built by the IT operations team. We use Hyperion reports but reports in BIRST have a good user interface. This tool helps us to visualize the sales data and helps in forecasting and decision making.
- Speed - It reads the data from flat files very quickly and performs transformations quickly.
- Intuitive dashboard. It produces attractive dashboards which are easy for the business user to understand the data.
- It is very easy to use and the customization it offers helps to build as per one's need.
- Predictive analytics can be more accurate.
- Though it is easy to use, select modules/features need training to use.
- The help or any question posted in the community will not be answered quickly. More customer support is needed.
July 25, 2017
Birst as the new challenger in BI analytics
[It's being used as a single] internal BI tool. Itenableses self sevice data analysis for end users.
- Fast visualization and data extraction
- Ongoing enhancements and feature upgrades
- Simple to use and well documented
- System availability, auditing and enhanced transparency
May 19, 2017
Birst is not recommended for imbedded solutions
Embedded in a product
- Visual dashboards
- Dynamic dashboards
- Data load speed
- Data mapping is complex
- Cost is high
April 26, 2017
One Stop Shop
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Birst is utilized by multiple departments. We have started with the following: design partners, operations, accounting, investments and client services. We are in the initial deployment stages, but eventually will be [using it] across our entire organization. We utilize it to measure the health of our property from revenue performance to reputation management.
- The application is customizable to our industry.
- Interactive dashboards allow users to make decisions without having to go to different software programs to gather the data.
- The functionality in designer needs improvement. We have to use designer for several of our reports and the subject areas are not easy to find what you need. It is not intuitive.
- We can't use visualizer for all of our reporting.
Birst is being leveraged across various departments within the organization. One of the most notable issues it addresses is providing data across disparate systems in one location!
- Consolidated data ("One source of truth")
- Heavily customizable
- Select module(s)/feature(s) require extensive training to master
- High volume report birsting can be untimely
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are embedding Birst in our products. Our customers will consume dashboards we create, but also use Birst as a platform to develop their own dashboards to use within their organization. The networked BI will allow us to provide customers with a standard data model (eliminating data silos) while also allowing freedom to explore data beyond our model. Visualization capabilities are also critical for us.
- Birst handles visualizations very well. The visualizer and dashboard tools are simple to use but effective.
- Retrieving data through their preconfigured data connectors for Salesforce and Jira.
- The Birst API seems to cover everything. We haven't used it yet, but it seems like it will meet our needs very well based on feedback from actual customers at their customer conference.
- The back-end admin tool is still Fash. It should be changing soon.
- Data modeling can be confusing for the Birst novice. Knowing what you want to do and how to actually get Birst to do it as an admin can be more complex than it needs to be.
- Implementation. If they documented some best architectural practices, we could move more quickly and be less dependent on contacting Birst for support.
April 24, 2017
ebury birst review
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Birst is being used as one of the primary business intelligence tools. We have been aggressive in our implementation for the last year, bringing on 3 different business units with the rest waiting on their turn to add data into Birst. Birst is an incredibly powerful tool when used correctly.
- Invests back into the product, to improve the user experience.
- Listens to its community to help drive the future of the product.
- Good user base to help with issues and ways to deal with real time issues.
- Training material online, having such a forward thinking company with such a backward approach to training material and documentation is a strange mix.
- Not enough experienced people with technical implementation experience. When questions are asked to Birst people their typical answer is "Have you looked through the documentation?" Translation, I don't know the answer, and I don't know off hand anyone else that does either.