Birst: good for small or mid-sized companies, not so good for enterprise scale
March 13, 2018

Birst: good for small or mid-sized companies, not so good for enterprise scale

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Birst

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.
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).
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).

Infor Birst Feature Ratings

Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
2
Report sharing and collaboration
6
Publish to Web
9
Publish to PDF
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
4
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
5
Predictive Analytics
2
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
5
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
4
Responsive Design for Web Access
6
Mobile Application
7
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6