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Infor Birst

Infor Birst

Overview

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, …
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Birst almost live access

6 out of 10
January 09, 2019
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 …
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Birst review

2 out of 10
March 30, 2018
Incentivized
We used Birst as a visualization tool for selling our analytical services to our clients. It was used by multiple people internally (data …
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Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 20 features
  • Drill-down analysis (78)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (77)
    8.0
    80%
  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (72)
    8.0
    80%
  • Formatting capabilities (77)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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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
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Product Demos

Extending Analytics in CloudSuite Distribution - Demo

YouTube

Analytics Anytime, Anywhere - Birst Mobile Demo

YouTube

Automated Data Refinement in Infor Birst - Demo

YouTube

Best Practices For Increasing Adoption of Analytics - Demo

YouTube

Infor Birst How-To Series – Connecting to Databases

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.4
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

6.9
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.3
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

5
Avg 8.0
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

Infor Birst Videos

Infor Birst Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesAll
Supported LanguagesArabic, English, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Spanish

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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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(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!

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 95)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Birst is great for rapid learning and development, and for taking the place of a data warehouse, ETL tool, and data visualization platform
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

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...).

Depending on the complexity of your company's data and business needs it may or may not be a good fit. I would say it can be a good BI ecosystem for small and mid-size companies with low complexity so they can have data ingestion and reporting capabilities with one single tool.

If you need to integrate data from many different data source;, your environment does change quite frequently, you have many different business areas, the data volume you have is quite big... then it is less appropriate.

January 14, 2019

Birst Review

Martin Hollænder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.

They get a BI platform where they can enhance the value of the Miralix contact center solution.
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.
If you need a end-to-end BI product with a lot of features and capability for making custom reports, Birst is great. However your company needs to be of a certain size and there are a lot of other similar products out there that are at least as good. An important note is to try different products, really be clear on that you need and not choose Birst lightly.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Birst is very appropriate for companies that have a low to mid-level of technical sophistication with data preparation, but have a high need for visibility and distribution. I think that it *can* become a good option for mid-sized companies for whom large scale BI implementations like Cognos or MicroStrategies are not practical, or in our case, even relevant, but it can be frustrating for those who have a high level of technical experience with data warehouse development as the tool is very specific and has a fairly steep learning curve, and the technical support resources don't always seem to have the appropriate level of expertise to deal with advanced users.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
January 09, 2019

Data Capture

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
BIRST is ideal when you have small data to report and very systematic reporting. It is not user friendly when changes need to be made.
January 09, 2019

Birst almost live access

Tim Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
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
We find the performance of the dashboards is sometimes very slow - and has been noted by customers. a key question would be to confirm the acceptable delay and build the dashboards around that kpi.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used across the business to pull buying and selling prices for the individual clients, all the way to larger agency level. It is currently linked to other products as well, which is how it is updated for reporting each day. It allows for information to be refreshed on a scheduled basis where in which this means the data team does not have to spend their time consistently running basic reports, other teams can pull it off themselves.
  • Allows individual teams opportunity to create their own individual dashboard, specific to their clients and needs.
  • Splits our costs easily, with an easy to use filter option, making reporting much faster.
  • In order to run Birst on a schedule, a ETL had to be created, this would be much more helpful.
  • Visually Birst could improve, we use a large amount of visualisations in presentation and have to use a different software to create these
  • Lack of stability in the product, we often experience issues where in which Birst is delayed or down. This being rectified would be extremely beneficial across the entire business.
Well suited to provide an easy to use dashboard for non-data analysts. Allows for pulling off figures easily due to the filtering tool and being able to hold multiple different databases on one server. The small visualizations that it does provide are useful as well for our teams. For weekly reporting it is a useful tool, and is easily able to link to other software as well.

For a software which needs to be frequently updated on a schedule it is not always very suitable. There are some instances where in which Birst is down and we are unable to produce reports on time or with the most recent information.
Sanja Prstojevic | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
It is a very good tool in general. Probably, works better when you refresh your data once a day than when you do it very often (every 15 min or less).
Robin Filan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
  • Even though the visualization tool makes nice views, it is not as robust as even years old versions of Tableau. In particular I've found I often export my data out of Birst and into Tableau when I want to visualize two or more attributes.
  • 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.
It's not like Tableau, it's a whole BI platform to combine data from lots of sources. It does that better than a lot of other tools and has a good method for distribution. The learning curve is VERY high.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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
Birst is great for visualizing large amounts of data. They provide a number of different visuals to help better understand data. They are very good at descriptive data, however, if you would like to get into predictive or preemptive analytics, another tool might be better suited.
March 30, 2018

Birst review

Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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)
Not appropriate for citizen development.
Sean Keesler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Birst internally to analyze sales and marketing data to improve our marketing efforts (ROI on digital marketing spend) and to provide insights to our eLearning operations team.
Our marketing team analyzes time series of marketing spend vs the revenue received attributable to that spend and adjusts digital campaigns to optimize ROI.
The operations team extract student engagement data from our LMS and identifies students at risk of not completing their coursework in a timely fashion so that they can engage with them to identify issues and assist.
  • Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
  • Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.
  • The Birst product uses it's own query language (BQL) which we feel has been implemented in different ways in different parts of the product.
  • This makes learning the entire product more difficult than it ought to be.
  • The Birst idea of grains and hierarchies is hard to get a foothold on. I don't think I completely get it yet.
If you are looking for "Instant BI", Birst isn't that tool.
If you want to roll your own solution using a single application to perform all of your ETL, reporting/dashboard, like to get deep in the weeds and have a lot of control of how your data is processed, this is going to make you smile.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Processing your own well-defined datasets seems to work well. Trying to process more dynamic sets where the data is not well defined (customer defined fields) is not impossible, but takes a lot more work arounds and tricks.

Working with trend data works well. Trying to report on real-time operational data is more tricky due to the time it takes to process your space. I have not used some of their direct connection offerings that might help alleviate that though.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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".
  • 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.
Birst is a great tool for supporting well-governed analytics data modeling. It has a good balance between the effort required by an IT/ETL specialist and business analysts and reports writers.
Birst does not shy away from the challenges of data governance and stewardship vs the dangers of "quick and easy" departmental or project specific analytic projects where business rules are "invented" vs managed and data cube chaos can quickly become a big IT problem.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Birst is a fantastic tool for quick decisions and big picture analytics. The ability to build dashboards and dashlets allows for significant amounts of data being presented on mobile or full-size devices. The challenge comes with deep analytics. While details can be provided on the dashboards or via reports, these are not always easily manipulated in the same as say an Excel sheet.
Stephane F. Tremblay | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.

Appropriate:

- To provide self-service analytics to our customers, its embedding capabilities, self-services tools and ETL capabilities.

Less appropriate:

- The platform has the disadvantage of its advantages, it does many things for you but not always to your liking so we sometimes had to bypass Birst and work with the DB directly for instance. We also faced challenges to make the platform fit in our context using streaming data sources and the delivery of a single solution into different customers environment.

March 16, 2018

Birstarific

David Pearlman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Birst is well suited for companies looking to automate pipeline /activity reporting especially for companies that don't have complicated backend systems. We have a "ninja" at D&B who's well versed within Birst which helps a ton. Development is performed by him / his team and we QA and develop new use cases.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
Very easy and intuitive to use, however lacking some features and has some quality of life issues for everyday use
March 16, 2018

Multi-tenant review

Lee Ann Benson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Birst is well suited for multi-tenant, multi-database systems where data integration is important. It is also great for business users that don't have reporting development skills.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Birst to provide financial and business measures to our internal clients. The data loaded may be used by almost any department in the company. There are a set of standard dashboards created but we have a set of power users in each department that can also create ad-hoc requests with visualizer feature.
  • You can load data to Birst with the same SQL you use to load source databases.
  • Implementation is easy as it is all Web & Cloud based. Only a few components will need to be installed on your local server when you go to production.
  • Modeling your data is difficult. It is a very manual process and easy to get one of the pieces incorrect.
  • Birst processing of dashboards is slow. They need to work on speeding up the screen and data retrieval.
  • The product is unstable. Spaces are prone to corruption causing rework.
There are better products for any situation. Birst is not the best product of choice at this time.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 very well suited to present outcomes based on disparate data sources.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Birst works better for non-complex BI solutions.

Being a cloud solution helps with adoption of the tool, as there's no need to have an internal support team dedicated to platform maintenance. The usage of Network BI is quite buggy and should be avoided for complex BI solutions. Management of users is very complex in large organisations, as the administration interface is very reduced and Birst support is needed (with the delays it brings).
March 12, 2018

Friend of Birst

Donald Woodruff | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
  • Bringing together data from multiple sources into one platform.
  • Great flexibility to simplify and display data.
  • There is a large learning curve to achieve full implementation.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Across the enterprise. It addresses many reporting needs across the company for different business lines.
  • Quick visualizations and data insights
  • Quick import of excel or csv files for ad hoc or discovery
  • When data model correct, ability to connect data to other data
  • Dynamic dashboards
  • No source control for change control policies
  • Does not follow normal Dev, QA, Production deployments meaning you have to copy spaces to promote collections/reports and in other cases have to recreate Custom Attributes, Filters etc from space to space instead of normal deployment procedures.
  • Quirky things that happen with no visibility into what happened, missing security settings while swapping spaces, things working sometimes and broken other times
  • Better security and roles, Admin functions or search capabilities, more windows style navigation to easily move things around as needed in collections/dashboards.
  • Better metadata Admin functions for tracking production level collections and reports, security groups and users within those groups, and easily producing lists of all Measures, Attributes, variables, custom attributes, custom measures, and ways to manage and cross reference these items within reports or dashboards
Well suited to enterprise reporting when data model valid, one version of the truth if used by all areas for data that is processed consistently for up to date information. Not well suited for dynamic changes within the org where either data changes are required or new reporting is needed as users are used to Excel and doing their own reports faster. It is too technical and complicated for average business user, especially if data model is not simple and easy to follow.
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