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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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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 Enterprises (1,001+ 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 69)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst provide a much better web UI and end user experience and distribution mechanism than both Tableau and SSRS. Power BI simply did not have the full complement of features that we needed at the time of our selection to be competitive and Pentaho was too custom and would have required an investment in professional services that we could not afford. SSRS is good for data dumps, but creating user friendly visualizations is not practical.

Snowflake ended up as our EDW platform, and we integrate that with Birst to provide a complete BI stack for our end users.
January 09, 2019

Birst almost live access

Tim Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Birst is not as intuitive or flexible for cube design and aggregations as using SQL Analysis services - at times seems an odd mix between gui based, and required specific code.
Power BI is the tool of choice internally, but is limited by security settings that we need to enable to suport client access.
Tableau is unfortunately beyond our budget to provide the solution we would like to deliver.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Key evaluation criteria:
- Is how quickly the query runs
- The code and metadata for the database
- How user-friendly the output is
- Ability for the dashboard or output to be shared amongst the business
- The visualization tools
- Stability of the database
Birst is a good data storage system which also allows for us to create different dashboards, therefore is a good choice for holding our past buying and selling information.
Robin Filan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst was the only tool that did the following:
  • robust enough ETL for our data warehouse team
  • data would remain within our data warehouse and not within the tool's proprietary store, in case the company went out of business.
  • allow us to distribute reports within the company within their tool
  • embed reporting as iframes
  • relatively easily to build reporting
  • connect to many different kinds of data.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
There are a few items I evaluate when looking at different tools.
  1. Price per user
  2. License price
  3. scalability
  4. Customization
  5. Embedded
  6. How data is processed
A lot of tools that provide the same functionality are quite expensive. These other tools are built for big data and large enterprises. If a mid-size or small organization needs these capabilities, they should evaluate or look at cheaper alternatives. Might not need all the functionality these tools provide.
Sean Keesler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst was better than Domo for our needs because we could get in and tinker with it. Our impression of Domo was that it had a lot of connectors and ready to go reports, but it made too many assumptions about applications we use. We customize too much to use a "ready to go" solution like that.
When we looked at Tableau, we liked its visualization capabilities, but it wasn't going to help us do the extractions, ETL, and warehousing of data. It may have come some distance since then.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have a lot of demos with a significant portion of them and reviewed several of the major industry studies as well. We had representatives of both user interests/design and the technical backend on the evaluation process.

The major features we were looking for a product that we could embed inside our own SaaS application, connect to a sharded Postgres database, had multitenancy and allowed for customer generated reports/ self-reporting. Some of the minor "nice to have" features we were looking at was scheduled reports, especially if we could plug it into our own scheduling system (for CAN-SPAM compliance), internationalization, and support.

In the evaluation, Birst hit all of the must-haves and enough of the nice to haves that they made it down to our final two and the trial was the clincher to make it our final choice.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The primary differentiator with Birst is its scalability. Every other system we have developed or reviewed is either very strong in a single focus or requires a large team to manage to deploy over multiple, diverse customers. We have been able to accomplish more successfully and more quickly with a single developer and 2 BA's than what has historically taken multiple developers years to accomplish.
March 16, 2018

Birstarific

David Pearlman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We compared Birst vs Tableau and Lumirra and there's no question that Birst is the best option from a cost perspective. Additionally, the ease of use complemented with our support team has allowed us to innovate on the platform quickly
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Cognos - this tool is also more difficult to set up, takes more time to develop dashboards, harder for the business user to navigate
MicroStrategy - this tool is also more difficult to set up, takes more time to develop dashboards, harder for the business user to navigate
MS Power BI - easier to model data, quickly develop dashboards, easy for business user to navigate
Qlik - easier to model data, quickly develop dashboards, easy for the business user to navigate
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We evaluated and compared Birst, OBIEE 12c, and Tableau based on several criteria such as "Data Analysis & Discovery", "Data Integration", "Security model", "Data Visualization", "User Experience" or "Infrastructure & Architecture".
The only point where Birst was rated higher was on the "Infrastructure & Architecture" side due to being a cloud solution.

When compared to Tableau, we can see that Birst has some reusable semantic layer and ELT data processing which is not available in Tableau (although Tableau Maestro project might change this).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • SAP Business Objects
The standard in our company is SAP Business objects. For the international part of the company we are using Birst because of its accesibility, ease of maintenance and ease of use. Compared to SAP BO dashboarding and easy to medium complex reports are easier to create and handle.
The administrator of a Birst platform doesn't has to be as technical as for other platforms. Of course, the more BI knowledge the better.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We originally selected Birst because they are a Partner of our ERP system provider. We re-evaluated and reconfirmed that decision after our new investment through a one week prototyping exercise that proved how quickly something that delivers real content and value can be built in Birst. from the prototype we have moved on to develop dozens of different dashboards
March 08, 2018

Birst for all

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use other BI tools within the organization. These tools have been there before we got BIRST and while comparing, BIRST did score well against these tools but the migration cost to convert existing reports/data prevented us from replacing those tools with BIRST.
March 07, 2018

Birst Review

Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
So much easier to be able to pull data using a query at times, which should be supported alongside drag and drop options. I can actually left join two tables when needed to provide data frequently requested by customers.
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