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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
(1-25 of 61)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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 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
March 30, 2018
Birst review
We used Birst as a visualization tool for selling our analytical services to our clients. It was used by multiple people internally (data models, visualizations, and analysis) and externally by clients.
- The flow of visualizations.
- Latency
- Ease of use
- Ability to learn how to quickly use the tool
- Difficulty in the integration of multiple data sources (Excel, JSON, web)
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
Pulse Analytics and Birst
Our organisation is using Birst to offer Analytics services to clients. It is used by the Analytics department, and is offered either as embedded as part of a larger software offering, or as a standalone solution
- Start-to-end data preparation, warehousing and report/dashboard development minimizes points of failure in an analytics solution
- Easy to quickly develop prototype/proof of concept projects, meaning more productivity
- Solution built for the cloud works seamlessly for users to access data anywhere
- Better documentation of features and user guides - it can be hard to find or understand how to use a feature
- Better feature request system - currently feature requests are sources from the community forums based on votes - multiple requests for the same issue may not individually receive enough votes to get implemented
- More options of chart types - currently limited in what we are able to provide as the best chart types for the data are not available.
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
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 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
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 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.
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
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