Birst Reviews

Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain.

Most of our customers are interested in dashboards and self-service reports. We are able to offer them these features with this solution.

• Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution
• The report performance is very slow

We have been using this solution for over two years.

Not so much.

Every upgrade has one issue or another. It is not very stable.

I heard that HTML version is stable

There were scalability issues. We found regressions.

Average.

Technical support is average.

We had custom implementation using fusioncharts and it is limited and we want to be ahead in the market. Make vs Buy, we opted to Buy.

The installation was not very complex. It is quite simple

It is implemented in house.

It is one of the flagship product for demos on how to create visualizations.

Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version

We evaluated D3.js and FusionCharts.

Take the HTML version. I heard that it offers good performance.

• Cloud based: One platform with all the ETL, connectivity, report and dashboard tools in one product. This allows for faster development and no integration problems.
• Network BI: (The ability to share data marts/stores/ERP/CRM/RDBMS data, etc.) This is a unique feature for data virtualization in the cloud. It enables Enterprise BI in the cloud.
• The ability to deploy DWHs at lightning speed. This affords 60% faster development than traditional BI projects.
• Supports mobile connectivity and interaction. All the information, anytime and anywhere on your desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
• It is a step towards self-service-BI because of the user-friendly interface.

This is the best cloud based BI platform/solution out there.

We are a vendor/partner, so we have been able to create a valuable business model for migrating our customers from legacy systems to this cloud BI platform. Internally, we are gradually introducing this product enterprise-wide to support various operational divisions. As a partner we host our own Appliances for the SMB market in the Benelux area.

• Release management and version control are poor or not available. As a partner you have to organize your own version control and release management system.

We have been running our own Birst cloud for five years.

No, the support is very good.

We had a few issues relating to older versions, but these have long since been eradicated.

We have not encountered any scalability issues. Just follow the guidelines on hardware/software requirements and this will scale fine.

The level of customer service is very high. Every customer has it's own CSM (Customer Success Manager) which is taking care of open issues. The CSM contacts the customer on a regular frequency and is the single point of contact for the organization.

They excel in this area as the technical support is truly outstanding.

We were not using a previous solution. We were looking to enter the market with a cloud based offering. We wanted to differentiate ourselves by providing consultancy and support for a multitude of traditional BI legacy systems.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Our time to market was impressive.

We implemented Birst with our own specialized team.

Our ROI is based on reselling subscriptions and providing professional services to our customer.

The pricing and licensing structure is based on a subscription model. Comparing pricing with other tools is difficult, because hosting costs are included in the total package. Always calculates the TCO over three years and then you'll see that the subscription model is 40% - 65% cheaper.

We looked at QlikView, Tableau , and Birst.

If you are serious about a cloud-based BI solution, then Birst has great value. This option will help your enterprise reduce costs and create a ‘one version of the truth’ report and a data warehousing solution.

If you are looking for a solution that replicates the creation of thousands of lists/reports, then Cloud BI is not really the solution.

ETL process is excellent as well as the admin tools to set it up. Creation of the meta-data layer has been well thought out by the Birst design team. Working with the front-end Dashboard, KPI and Dashlet tools is a snap. Easy to learn and use. The Mobile version is coming on strong in 2017. Just reviewed the product with the Product Manager and it's the way forward for being used on the go.

Prior to using Birst, Apex did not have BI readily available to the customers. Now we have three tool sets, each matching one of our product lines. The customers are able to see patterns and trends never before available. It opens up their eyes to changing their business to increase profitability.

I would like to see stronger in-built permissions capabilities. Everything we need to do can be done and passed to the product using an API. It would be nice if we could define the rule set within Birst. The addition of easy-to-use predictive analysis is coming in Birst 6, which is a missing piece right now.

I have used it for one year.

We are running the Birst appliances on AWS. A bit of learning to install the first one in North America but after that, the EU was done in half a day.

We are running Birst against a large data set, millions of new rows each day. To date, it has performed well; no complaints on our end.

Scalability is why we went with Birst. It had the robustness built in to take us to where we wanted to be. We looked at several popular tools and liked them, but Birst was the ultimate choice.

Customer service is fantastic! We don't use Birst support often but when we do, they have been highly responsive. We've built a relationship with several of the support team members, which has been helpful when we want advice on making changes on the admin side.

I rate technical support the same as the customer support. Outstanding! The technical team is there for support or advice to get you where you need to go. I never experience a long wait for any technical issues; never had any pressing technical issues.

We did not previously use a different solution. This is the first venture into BI for Apex. In the past, the customers relied on a limited set of reports built into the OLTP application. Birst takes the reporting data to a whole new level.

Initial setup was straightforward. As an appliance customer, we were in control of installation with assistance from Birst. It installed easily in less than a day.

We installed in conjunction with Birst support. There were pre-install webinars to make sure everything was ready and the install took less than half a day.

We're seeing uses for the BI beyond the impressive visualization provided to our customer. Sales now has a new, clean, powerful tool in their belt. Support can easily get to data never before available. The impact of Birst has been felt company-wide.

Birst is a reasonably priced tool with a wide array of capabilities. Make sure you understand the depth and breadth of the product when comparing it to other BI tools. Much is easy to do, which hides the complexity present in competitors' products.

We did review many other products and liked features of each. Qlik, Sisense, and Spotfire were three others seriously considered. In the end, it came down to feature set and price.

Fantastic user community. We use it daily for advice or to offer advice. Birst employees regularly add information, tips or tricks. The best user community we've ever been involved in.

Birst admin is a great module which helps standardize data to a gold standard. We are able to integrate very quickly and get new data elements into the model.

Our organization is helping a cancer hospital bring insight from their data. We work on highly regulated PHI data.

I would want to see some improvement in the user management module. User management should be designed to do some bulk operations from UI.

We have been using Birst for the last three years.

We have not encountered any deployment issues. We were able to set up standard deployment and upgrade processes with the help of a Birst consultant we had for some time.

I used to encounter lot of issues between 5.19 to 5.23 releases but now, the product seems very stable. I am excited to see the new admin module.

We have been able to scale pretty quickly and easily. It has been great experience and I love this product.

Customer service is great with one dedicated customer success manager and great support org. It has been great experience and I love this product.

Technical support is 10 out of 10. It has been a great experience and I love this product.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

An in-house team implemented it with the help of a Birst consultant.

The ROI is great.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Tableau and Qlik Sense. We found Birst as a great option for what we are trying to achieve.

The dashboards and Visualizer are the most valuable features.

Birst has made it easier for us to provide embedded data visualization tools to our customers.

The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated. By “clunky” I mean that it sometimes becomes confused and throw an error when I’m making a change. To clear it up, I will have to log out and log back in. We knew going into our purchase that the UI for the admin was not the strongest part of Birst at the moment. Power users often depend on the web services to complete admin tasks and the web services are robust.

Birst knows they need to improve this area of their system and have been working on that. They began improving usability overall with the the front-end UI that report writers utilize and did an excellent job with that so I have good reason to expect the admin module UI refresh to be solid as well. From what I understand, the planned changes are more significant than a simple UI refresh also.

I have used it for six months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues. Implementation can be tricky, but they have services to help with that.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We use Birst cloud and so far have not seen any scalability issues.

Support is good. We have an assigned CSM who helps us track down help quickly.

Technical support is solid. Things are documented well, also.

We previously used a different solution. The solution we used was outdated and when we decided to upgrade, we shopped around to find the best solution available for our needs.

The basic setup can be straightforward, but Birst is powerful and with power comes complexity. The front-end report designing with Visualizer and the dashboard tool are easy to use. The admin tool is simple also, but has many options.

An in-house team implemented it.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Tableau, MS Power BI, and Sisense.

1) Connection to external sources : Birst uses several connection methods to take data in from your data sources and stages it into its own “Data Mart” if you will.

2) Staging and Warehousing: This stages data from several sources makes Birst a fairly robust data warehouse solution. A lot of vendors can do that well and so does Birst.

3) Modeling: Birst utilizes a start schema for dimensional modeling of the data that is staged.

4) Visualization: In most vendors Data warehousing and then data modeling were two separate functionalities. The idea was to be able to sell visualization tools as a separate suite to users who already had an in-house warehouse.

However, recently, several vendors have started combining the warehousing and visualization abilities into one stop shop. For example, for a long time, Tableau was and probably is the leading provider of visualizer tools but warehousing data through tableau is much more cumbersome and resource intensive. Birst, Qlikview etc. have not been able to provide the exact beautification and features in the visualizer for self-service dashboards as Tableau but they have managed to seamlessly allow data visualization and dashboard development from the warehouse on the go.

This goes into the technical inter-operability of the warehouse with visualization, data understandability, query performance and render time.

The objective of using Birst-mediated dashboards is to deliver interactive and online information to our clients in a client-specific and data-distributed format. We are yet to realize the real return on the investment given the need to alter the underlying intention of the product’s use.

From a visualization perspective, this tool claims to make several advances that are indeed interesting to a large proportion of the user base. However, it needs to prioritize several extremely fundamental features associated with charting, formatting and layout control.

Some basic features that Birst needs to improve are:

• Line graph between two measures (comparing one measure to another without summing them) – Basic scatter plot sums the measure up automatically.
• Spark lines need to be made available.
• Editing trend lines and gridlines in graphs – An option for customizing label location, label background under formatting chart elements such as gridlines and labels, custom label backgrounds and transparency, etc.
• An option to customize the alignment of headings in any table as left, right, center, top, middle and bottom. Also there is need to add label customization in a table that is not associated to any measure but just plain text, instead of having to change it on the dashboard as a text input, which also does not re-size in the same ratio as the other components do when the screen size is modified.
• Conditional filter – An additional option to use a filter “where variable-xyz in (a,b,c,d,)” type of statement for filtering attributes. This is helpful when the list of attributes is long and can be used instead of manually select each box.
• Conditional display of KPI – For example, if the date range is x, then display KPI A; if the date range is y, then display KPI B.
• Conditional indicators – A solution to give conditions to KPI indicators rather than to have a measure to check against a predefined number.
• Unnecessary padding spaces around graphs, KPIs, tables – An option to be able to define the space and padding.
• An option to customize a measure within a given timeline, embedded in the measure itself. There should be way to define that timeline dependent on a user-selected time in dashboard filters. Currently, there is no ability to display several measures on different time scales in the same table. For example, measure 1, 2 and 3 current, over last quarter and over last year.

I have been using it for three years

I have encountered several workspace migration errors that alter internal (backend) report/dashboard address associations.

Some minor scalability issues include:

• Copy over time
• Data connectivity
• Render time

I would give technical support a 6.5/10 rating.

Our organization did not use any other solution. We decided to select Birst as our vendor as an initial choice.

The setup was complex in terms of:

• Availability of professional services
• Definition of custom requirements and initial set-up of a data model

I would recommend others about the following:

• Vet the product based on existing feature set.
• Roadmap delays may impact urgent requirements therefore plan the selection choice accordingly.
• Gain sharing model of pricing should be better if there is the room for negotiation wherein the product can be received at the base cost and then a payout based on promised service level achievements.

Birst was a choice, made prior to me joining the company. Even though I
am not the right person to comment on this, in my understanding Tableau, Crystal
and others were also being considered.

I would suggest the below:

• Clarity on end goals
• User perspective and utilization
• Medium of delivery to the user
• Availability of internal/resident admin(s) for Birst networking and data modeling
• Availability of Birst professional services
• Thorough vetting of existing feature set v/s critical business needs

• Built-in application connectors for most common purposes: ERP/CRM AWS and REST API.
• Single suite module from ETL for reporting and dashboards
• Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs.

I built dashboards for the sales and marketing department which helped them do forecasting.

Birst constantly rolls out new features so they are always improving. Birst has a very active forum online. People post lots of feedback in regards to existing features. At times, they need to improve.

In my case, I needed a REST API connection and an AWS connection. They released those features after a few months.

I would like to see better connection functionality. It is not very intuitive and the UI is kind of neglected.

We have used this solution for two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

I used Microsoft BI suite. Our company is the sole reseller of Birst.

The cloud based version is pretty straightforward. The appliance version needs some configuration, but it's not difficult.

We explored other alternatives, but there are no other solutions like Birst that do cloud BI analytics.

It depends on what they purchase. If it is an appliance, then go with AWS.

I found the ETL process very valuable to us.

It has provided new levels of analytic consolidation.

• The ETL needs a graphical processing/workflow interface
• Error logging is cumbersome to work through to find issues
• Visualizations require add-ons with other products to become state-of-the-art
• We were hoping that Birst would introduce an add-on with Tableau. To date, we have not heard any more about it.

I have used it for two years.

There were some stability issues. The processing engine occasionally fails with no apparent reason.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. For an additional cost, you can scale as needed. For our needs, it is scalable without additional cost at this time.

We found technical support to be very good and responsive. Tier one support has higher technical expertise than with most other products we use.

We did use another solution. But when we moved to the cloud ERP, we no longer wanted to use an on-premise BI.

This solution also had better connectivity options for the hybrid cloud environment that we found ourselves in at the time.

I came along later in the project. However, it seems that the initial setup was straightforward.

It should be noted however, that Birst Professional Services should not have let us stray too far from the more out-of-the-box methodologies that we employed for the initial implementation.

As a result, we had significant reworking to do in order to resolve some issues and to scale properly.

I was not involved in the evaluation. It seems that the business decided in advance and did little due diligence.

I would recommend using an expert third-party partner to assist in the implementation rather than using Birst Professional Services.

• Good drag and drop dashboard widgets
• Ability to create formulas and custom calculations
• Ability to create ETL jobs for simple data warehouse creation
• Automates the creation of the star schema
• Automatically creates facts and dimensions based on data types

We actually do not use it anymore as it did not meet our needs.

• The query generation is inefficient and cannot be tweaked. You have to live with whatever queries are generated by the system.
• The ETL process creates enormous temp files: Disk space can be an issue with big data sets.
• Troubleshooting is problematic: The system is a black box. Once a trouble spot is identified, there is very little ability to change the issue.

I have used the solution for close to two years.

We encountered a stability issue as this solution did not scale in our environment. It was not performing in our OEM environment with the size of our database.

The ETL, querying, and user interface did not accommodate our performance requirements.

Technical support was good. They just couldn't address the performance issues.

The initial setup was easy. It is just a virtual appliance.

We had a complex setup that involved OEM and integration which was painful.

We evaluated some other options.

Birst is a great tool for:

• Creating a simple data warehouse
• Uploading data for quick analysis, visualizations, and dashboards

It is not a great tool to integrate into an enterprise level application.

It can be integrated with Sales Force. Users can jump to the Birst dashboard from SFDC without a repeat login.

The user can view a product usage dashboard within the SFDC.

• User interface: The screen layout is not up to the market standards
• Customer support: Not helpful at all
• Site/user administration: There is no user administration function on the front end. Most activities require a manual command.

We have been using this solution for two years.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 3/10.

Before choosing this product, we were not using another solution.

The initial setup was extremely complex. The Birst consultants wasted a lot of time in configuring the system.

We have no specific comments regarding this issue.

I was not involved in the selection process.

I would suggest they use something else instead.