Solid tool with opportunites to become even better.
Updated January 10, 2019
Solid tool with opportunites to become even better.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Birst
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 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.
Snowflake ended up as our EDW platform, and we integrate that with Birst to provide a complete BI stack for our end users.
Infor Birst Feature Ratings
Using Birst
We leverage Birst as an Enterprise data platform. That means nearly every department consumes most if not all of their reporting in Birst. These departments include Executive Management, Sales, Product, Marketing, Business Development and IT. Different departments have different levels of usage and use cases - most departments use the interactive dashboards that we provide, but our Product and Marketing teams dig deep into detailed analysis using the drill down and visualizer functionality.
11 - We have 2 teams that support our Birst development. One focusing on back end data engineering and building out live access spaces to support well established dashboards and ensuring that the most current data is always available in Birst. Another team focuses on prototyping and ad hoc support, as well as designing the most efficient user interfaces for analysis. This team typically imports data into the Birst platform for ease of development, and when the features are finalized, if there is value in developing a data mart and corresponding live access space, we partner with the back end team to do so.
- Business analysis
- Product analysis
- Marketing analysis
- Dashboard automation
Yes - Birst replaced Tableau Server. We found that Tableau, while great in a single user desktop environment, did not scale to the enterprise level, both from a cost and a performance perspective. With Birst we were able to provide access to everyone in our organization at 1/3 of the cost of licensing Tableau to support that number of users, and the performance gains were significant.
- Price
- Product Features
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
We had a very positive sales experience with Birst. The team was very supportive and engaged in a very extensive proof of concept which allowed us to see in a real-world setting what it would be like to use this product and compare it side by side with our existing tool set.