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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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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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
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September 28, 2021
A simple to use and effective business intelligence solution
We use Birst for all analytics and reporting needs across the entire company
- Easy Data Warehouse Modeling
- Rapid Report and Dashboard Development
- Convenient Scheduled Reports
- Fixing various bugs
- Improving support
- Quality of life changes
February 12, 2019
End to end BI solution for not complex scenarios
We adopted BIRST to be used as the enterprise BI solution so all departments with enterprise BI needs would use BIRST.
We use BIRST Cloud solution.
- Being a cloud solution the platform upgrades are not a pain point anymore.
- Once the data model is ready, building basic reports/dashboards are really straightforward.
- One single tool may cover all your business intelligence needs, from data ingestion to reporting so it can be cost-saving in terms of licensing.
- Building an analytical ready model does not require highly skilled developers.
- Lack of access to underlying database and use of non standard languages (propietary code) BQL and BIRST scripting.
- Very poor and not user-friendly administrative area. Big dependency on command line tasks (a few drag and drop) and lack of out of the box administrative views (reports and dashboards showing platform's response).
- Small community. Really difficult to find skilled resources in the market and few technical blog articles or videos available.
- Data ingestion capabilities do not scale. Being capable of ingesting data is an added value however, the solution is mainly based on SQL plus scripting (no out of the box monitoring capabilities, difficult to reverse-engineer...).
January 14, 2019
Birst Review
We use Birst as a value based SaaS platform for our contact center customers. We have more than 100 customers with 130 users on our Birst appliance.
Birst covers, among other things,
- Queue performance
- Workload per hour / quarter-hour
- Lost call overview
- Service level rate
- Answer call rate
- Customer wait time overview
- Agent performance
- Work time overview
- Agent behavior
- Department / address / region performance
- IVR performance
- Cost-Benefit Analysis regarding ad-based campaign numbers
- Closed hours analysis
- The multi-tenant capabilities of the product is really great.
- Its relatively easy go get started with the product.
- The support is great.
- The flow of new features and improvements are constant.
- The customer success program is good.
- Its fairly complex for "normal" users to master/use the product (normal being supervisors, IT professionals etc.).
- The administration part of the product could be better, easier to use and manage.
January 10, 2019
Solid tool with opportunites to become even better.
Birst is our enterprise-wide BI visualization and distribution platform. Our company has 4 different revenue models ranging from big buy advertising, subscription based advertising, affiliate / performance based revenue as well as (digital) product driven revenue. Nearly every department here uses it for something, though it does not yet solve all problems within most departments. Currently we are able to report and distribute sales numbers to individual account executives as well as provide sales management views across as well as revenue and user across our B2C business lines as well. It solves for reporting automation and some visualization as well as distribution.
- For end users, Birst has a friendly UI that allows them to naturally interact with reporting data via web browser.
- For properly modeled data, the visualizer tool makes it easy do build quick visualizations.
- Surfacing data on dashboards with global filters allows users the flexibility to view multiple metrics with the same lens.
- Data modeling is a particular challenge for both novice and experienced data engineers. The ETL tools are insufficient to meet even 1/2 of our needs, and as a result we have a separate platform for data warehousing and use the back end of Birst solely for data exploration projects.
- There are occasionally delays in the UI when applying filters that often lead users to think that something is broken when in fact they just need to wait a few more seconds for the UI to change, even to let them know that it's still updating.
- Customer service, while it has improved, is still poor relative to other vendors that we work with. I often feel that both our CSM and our support technicians are defensive and try to push the responsibility for sub-optimal experiences back on us, and while it sometimes *is* the case that it is an issue on our end, more often it is not and even when it is we shouldn't FEEL like that. None of our other vendors take this approach, and even when the problem is on our end, they support us getting through it in a much less defensive way.
January 10, 2019
Birst used to meet an analytics requirement for our clients
Birst is used as an analytics platform for our clients in addition to our existing ERP. Our clients had a need for an analytics solution and Birst was the most suitable platform that met our requirements. On top of data from the ERP, we are networking with data from other sources and bring them together in a single, unified product. Our client's experience involves interactive dashboards and emailed reports. These dashboards are being used across our client's organizations.
- 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
- Unable to develop snowflake schemas
- Occasional slowness of the dashboards due to load on the cloud server
- Report distribution sometimes fails, with not all recipients receiving reports on time
- Spaces will occasionally get stuck in a processing or copying state, which means we have to wait for Birst Support to release it before we can proceed with publishing new data
January 09, 2019
Data Capture
Birst has been used across the orgnainization. It is used for reports bookings.
- Tabular visualisation
- Exporting into excel
- Filtering
- Updating. It has been very slow
- Easy to use. People find it difficult and not intuitive
- Maintenance. Difficult to address errors and find a solution
January 09, 2019
Birst almost live access
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Birst is used as a delivery mechanism to display data to our client. We collect data on mobile device usage patterns, as well as analyst forecasts across many technology areas, and use Birst to visualise this data via dashboards that clients access from our website.
- Connects directly to many types of external data sources, enabling us to plug into data where it already exists
- Visualiser provides a user friendly interface for non-tech users to build their own databases
- HTML dashboards look far better now than the original Flash versions
- Connectivity between the live sources frequently drops and does not reconnect automatically
- Cannot add dynamic titles to reports - so although can create a dynamic text box, this title cannot be exported along with the report
- Designer runs query as soon as an attribute is dropped on screen - would be useful if you know you need to add another 4, to be able to disable the query execution until all items have been added
January 08, 2019
Birst - 9 years after we met
Birst has been used across the organization (SCM & Operations teams ) as well as embedded in SFDC (by Sales team) and exposed as a portal to our partners. We have built different dashboards and alerts that help us with managing our SC business as well as provide order and shipment information to our sales team and partners.
- Data/data source import (from different sources DBs, txt and xls files, ....) and setup is very easy and fast
- Very good Dashboard performances (Dashboards/Dashlets built in Visualizer and Dashboards 2.0 )
- Powerful data preparation tools
- More stable new releases
- All modules related to data upload and processing need to be improved to better support more frequent uploads and data processing
- Prompts creation and maintenance need to be more user-friendly and provide performance improvements
- Admin module needs improvements in performances as well as data source/catalog maintenance area
We use Birst in addition to a separate data warehouse to ingest Google Analytics, event tracking, operational and sales data. We build reports that are distributed across the company by giving everyone a Birst account and having them log in to view relevant dashboard.
There are two use cases:
1. The Data warehouse team has modeled the data into a data mart in the data warehouse. In this case we use a Live Access connection to create a report.
2. The data warehouse team has not modeled the data in the data warehouse yet, so the data is ingested with Birst Connect and then transformed with Birst ETL. The data is reloaded through Birst Connect by kicking off automated Windows Task Scheduler.
There are two use cases:
1. The Data warehouse team has modeled the data into a data mart in the data warehouse. In this case we use a Live Access connection to create a report.
2. The data warehouse team has not modeled the data in the data warehouse yet, so the data is ingested with Birst Connect and then transformed with Birst ETL. The data is reloaded through Birst Connect by kicking off automated Windows Task Scheduler.
- Easy to create visualizations
- Very attractive visualizations
- Connect to many data sources
- Terrible documentation and training resources. Sometimes not enough documentation, sometimes it is WRONG! Often we are told to post our issues to the Birst user forum, as if we should be able to figure out our own problems rather than Birst troubleshooting their own product.
- Sometimes when there are bugs we are told they will only be addressed by voting on them as feature requests, not addressing the bugs. Some feature requests are years old.
- When using Birst Connect there is a lot that can go wrong on the Birst side of things completely out of our control, and then we are waiting on technical support to resolve. In particular the space can get "locked" if we try to process while it's already processing. I've also experienced where a staging table was deleted in the user interface, but not the backend of the tool, so it failed until the support team manually removed it.
- Birst technical support is very weak. They often do not answer the phone, and they always ask to go on a call with you after submitting a ticket, no matter if we've provided extensive documentation within the ticket.
- The ETL features are incredibly hard to use, though very powerful. As someone who has an understanding of database theory I found the fact that the training refused to teach to "primary keys" and "foreign keys" and "facts and dimensions" and instead made us learn a whole different terminology of "levels" and "hierarchies" very confusing.
- Processing is entirely mysterious to us. There's little explanation of what is happening when it is processing, which makes it hard to troubleshoot when things go wrong.
- Terrible or non-existent error messages. When a scripted source fails to execute the log in the scripted source doesn't even generate an error message. We've also found that the error message "data format is not correct" doesn't actually mean that, but can mean a whole bunch of other things related to the model.
- Birst does not allow snowflake data structure more than 2 levels deep. This is a problem as our data warehouse is a snowflake, so we always have to flatten our tables.
- Birst sends its users to the user Forum, but half of the issues on there have not been resolved. There's a person whose job it is to reply whether the users have figured out a solution. Why is this our responsibility to figure out their tool?
- Very, very little support for using Live Access to connect to data. Some of the Birst support staff don't even know how to use it.
July 13, 2018
Birst, a data visualization tool
We use Birst a number of different ways. The first is to help our customer visualize their data. A majority of customers do not have the expertise to build these reports and visualizations so have done this for them. Our customers can use these reports to better understand their products, how they behave and function. We also use Birst internally to monitor how many devices have been deployed on our networks. We can monitor device transactions, API calls and much more. Within our organization, many departments use the Birst. From Sales, Customer Success, Product, marketing, and engineering.
- Customization of reports
- Embedded in existing dashboard
- Scalability of reports and amount of data it can process
- Variety of visualizations/graphs to view data
- Variety of filters to drill down to a specific set of data
- 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
We have embedded Birst into our SaaS offering to be used by our customers as one of their reporting options. We have embedded it both in minor dashlets on single record pages for a quick view of how records are doing and as a larger dashboard for more details and advanced reports. We also analyze some of our own statistics in Birst.
- Customer adoption and success are important to Birst. They have positions dedicated to our success, worked to making sure we knew how to solve our problems once we were past implementation, and have regular contact even after. Purchasing the TAM program increases that.
- Attractive reports that render quickly.
- Using the cloud offering we have had spaces malfunction, especially if we try to upload data and process them on a frequent basis. They seemed to have fixed this with one of their most recent releases and with us reducing the frequency we upload data (twice a day rather than every hour), but there are still occasional issues.
- Learning curve - Trying to figure out how to do things in a new system that I could do in seconds in SQL is a bit frustrating. The help, community, and our TAM rep helps with this, but it still happens.
March 21, 2018
BIrst - meeting challenges head on.
We are an OEM of Birst. We embed Birst into our SaaS offering.
Our SaaS offering is a mobile application that allows users to fill out advanced forms for data collection on activities they are performing during there work. We collect, extract and transform the data into a Birst data model and provide dashboards and reports to our users using Birst.
We provide dashboards and visualizations that provide insights into Field Operations, Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality, Quality of Work, and Field Coordination for the purpose of root cause analysis across these "areas of analysis".
Our SaaS offering is a mobile application that allows users to fill out advanced forms for data collection on activities they are performing during there work. We collect, extract and transform the data into a Birst data model and provide dashboards and reports to our users using Birst.
We provide dashboards and visualizations that provide insights into Field Operations, Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality, Quality of Work, and Field Coordination for the purpose of root cause analysis across these "areas of analysis".
- Birst provides a very scalable and high-performance BI Platform. Setting up a new project "space" is simple, fast and easy to manage.
- Birst provides a deep and comprehensive ETL and query capability to perform most any data transformation.
- Building out Dashboards is easy. Building new reports with the Visualization tool is easy and powerful.
- More visualization options and smarter 'auto' generated views.
- Predictive modeling.
- More contemporary look and feel to the Admin portal using HTML 5.
March 19, 2018
HarvestBI - Leveraging Birst to Improve an Industry
We are reselling the Birst platform as an extension of our ERP (HarvestERP) and DSD (HarvestDSD) solutions. Sales departments are the primary users at this time. We have on the roadmap operations and finance in the near future. Our goal is a homogenous implementation platform that can be rapidly deployed across our customer base.
- The ability to create a primary space that can be cloned repeatedly creates efficiencies in our development efforts.
- We have a broad spectrum user base in terms of technical ability. Being able to extend or limit groups' privileges allows for optimal control with maximum flexibility.
- One of our primary objectives is to utilize cloud resources. Birst allows us to leverage the technology but does not require the infrastructure allowing Harvest Food Solutions to focus on the solution.
- Mobility is a major part of Harvest Food Solutions product offering. The current mobile capabilities are limited when dealing with single sign on and multiple domains.
- The conversion from Designer to Visualizer has created challenges in features not being migrated.
- Live Access is a key feature for us, but we want to be able to mix Live Data with Historical Data. That is currently not a simple process and requires multiple spaces. A simpler method is desired.
March 19, 2018
Self-service analytics
It is embedded in our main UI web app in order to provide information related to metering.
- Self Services Analytics - Business users oriented tools
- Design tools
- Data Modeling tools
- New Self-services platform called Pronto
- Embedding capabilities
- Dashboards and Design tools through JS API
- Single-Sign-On support
- Web services availability
- Query dashboard catalog and permissions
- Manage users
- Data Import and processing for Streaming sources (used by StreamLoader App) – Cloud Friendly
- Incomplete TZ management (one env is one TZ)
- No TZ conversion support at BQL level (No DST support)
- DB physical query generated by Birst does not always leverage the Exasol aggregation capabilities.
- Incomplete I18N support.
March 16, 2018
Birstarific
Birst is mainly used across the Global Sales organization to provide sales reporting. Additional benefactors of the reporting are finance, product, customer service organization and other team members. The initial use case was to provide "snapshot" reporting so we could compare pipeline performance vs the same period prior year. We have been able to create new use cases based on the business needs and have built dashboards to help answer Sales Management's qs
- Ease of use.. you can bring it multiple sources of data and display in a dashboard
- Columnar database is efficient
- Dashboards have improved from a GUI nature
- I think they can improve the GUI dashlets, but that's not a game changer
March 16, 2018
Multi-tenant review
Birst is being used by Acxiom as a multi-tenant reporting system for Acxiom clients to review business and operational data from several databases and database types.
- Deployment for multi-tenant environments is much easier than others I have used.
- I like how easy it is to set up many dashboards and views that look standard and professional without a lot of formatting.
- The query speed is very good for large amounts of data if there are adequate aggregates set up.
- Documentation of the product in the help files is outdated and incomplete in many cases. Several features are only documented in the community because enough people have asked questions about a topic. The search functionality in both help and community is really bad.
- Support tickets take way too long to answer and the answers are often inadequate. I have never worked with a company that has so few people on the support team or that took so long to respond. This is my biggest complaint and one that may result in switching products if it is not addressed.
- User administration is scattered into many different places and bulk updates are only available for creating users. There should be bulk updates for adding users to spaces and to groups (possibly do all 3 things in one command?)
- The Data Flow and Manage Local Sources code can't be used simultaneously and there is no documentation as to why. When a use case comes up where you need to switch from one to another it causes big issues.
March 13, 2018
Birst helps us close sales
Birst plays a critical role in our commercial organization. We use Birst to make sure our field staff and in-house support personnel have the information they need to help close deals. Birst also gives our employees the flexibility to run custom reports or variations which may be more meaningful to the customer. The drill down capabilities also allow catering from C-level to department level.
- Flexibility of the tool
- Presentation level very appealing and intuitive
- Cloud offering makes implementation easier
- Birst is supported by partners. We have had issues with some of the partner companies. Once identified though they were quick to fix.
- Training scheduling did not align with our schedule and was not very flexible.
- We are regulated and our change process can take some time. When upgrades occur we could use more notice.
Birst is globally used worldwide within our organisation as an enterprise BI solution. We adopted Birst as a cloud solution.
- It automatically builds an analytical star model complaint with Ralph Kimball standards.
- It's an end-to-end tool providing any capability needed within a BI project.
- Visualizer is very easy and intuitive to use for users.
- Building ETL processes is very complex due to the multiple technologies and scripting needed (web service calls, Python, BQL, etc.)
- Testing or debugging is very difficult, especially due to the lack of access to the underlying database.
- Multiple bugs are faced during any implementation at any level: a feature working can stop working at any moment (either due to extending the usage of that functionality or due to Birst upgrade breaking old behavior).
- Birst community is small with lots of unanswered threads.
March 12, 2018
Friend of Birst
We use it across the organization as a real time monitor of our statics.
- Manages data from multiple sources.
- Variety of choices to display data
- Stable platform
- Customer service and support
- User friendly
- Improve Training
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 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.