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Birst vs ThoughtSpot comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
8.3
Birst offers substantial returns by providing visualization tools that impact the organization through enhanced sales and data access capabilities.
Sentiment score
7.2
ThoughtSpot enhances value with time savings, ease of use, and reduced costs, but user adoption affects ROI.
Using ThoughtSpot has resulted in significant time savings and improved business sales by allowing us to identify sellers and buyers across regions, facilitating targeted marketing.
ThoughtSpot saves a significant amount of time compared to other tools and is very user-friendly.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Birst's technical support is mixed; praised for responsiveness and customer service but faces challenges with time zones and reliance on forums.
Sentiment score
6.8
ThoughtSpot's customer support is praised for responsiveness but critiqued for depth, with mixed ratings on problem resolution.
I stopped opening tickets due to insufficient and untimely responses.
ThoughtSpot provides a dedicated customer success person and the ability to submit tickets online, with a response time of no more than a day.
I have escalated several questions to ThoughtSpot's technical support, which has helped resolve connection glitches and other issues.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.4
Birst's scalability receives mixed reviews; some praise it, while others face challenges, costs, and complexity, yet cloud solutions impress.
Sentiment score
7.2
ThoughtSpot offers effective scalability and growth, but may require improvements in role management and advanced preparation tools.
As our data has grown, I have validated huge datasets and complex models without significant issues.
Tableau, Power BI, or Looker have separate tools for preparation, customization, and storytelling.
The platform does not have technical problems with scaling data or connections.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.3
Birst users experience varying stability, with issues during upgrades and large datasets, though some report smooth performance improvements.
Sentiment score
7.1
ThoughtSpot is stable and fast for large datasets but faces occasional downtime, feature gaps, and integration challenges.
The responsiveness of accessing live data is exceptional and faster than most other BI tools.
This workaround consumed a lot of resources and led to reduced performance, with pinboards loading for approximately two minutes for each filter criterion.
I use it primarily for large datasets, and it performs faster than regular data visualization tools such as Power BI, which has limits on dataset size.
 

Room For Improvement

Birst struggles with performance, customization, UI, visualization features, inefficiencies, and support, requiring enhancements and modernization in various areas.
ThoughtSpot lacks visualization flexibility, geospatial options, customization, integration tools, and better organization, lagging behind Power BI and Tableau.
Enhancing integration capabilities with other tools like DBT would also be beneficial as it would make our lives easier.
Currently, it is not as customizable as the options available on Power BI or Tableau.
The platform also has fewer formulas and functions compared to Power BI and Qlik, limiting the creation of complex functions directly within ThoughtSpot.
 

Setup Cost

Birst offers market-standard pricing with a subscription model, providing comprehensive solutions and flexibility despite high entry costs.
ThoughtSpot offers competitive, flexible pricing between Tableau and Power BI, with options suited to various organizational needs.
HubSpot is expensive.
ThoughtSpot's pricing is reasonable and in line with other BI tools.
 

Valuable Features

Birst provides scalable data visualization, cloud-based architecture, and integrates ETL, reporting, and dashboards for efficient data-driven decisions.
ThoughtSpot's search-based functionality enables intuitive data exploration, empowering non-technical users to create reports and improve business efficiency.
When I upload a data dump, AI analytics suggest possible data visualizations and insights, which I can pin to dashboards or live boards for modification.
Its compatibility with most databases, including the latest from FlexMovely and Redshift, allows users to create joins and worksheets easily.
This alerting feature is very beneficial for our company at the moment, and we use it extensively.
 

Categories and Ranking

Birst
Ranking in Embedded BI
15th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (32nd)
ThoughtSpot
Ranking in Embedded BI
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (15th), Data Visualization (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Embedded BI category, the mindshare of Birst is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThoughtSpot is 5.0%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Embedded BI
 

Featured Reviews

it_user547323 - PeerSpot reviewer
We deploy dashboards using the integrated data warehousing and visualization abilities. Setup is complex.
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.
Sushma Polavarapu - PeerSpot reviewer
Creates user-friendly analysis environments for large datasets
The tool is user-friendly for the end users. It is primarily a search-based tool. Users do not need a technical background to work directly on the dataset. Its compatibility with most databases, including the latest from FlexMovely and Redshift, allows users to create joins and worksheets easily. ThoughtSpot is fast, even with one to ten terabytes of data.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?
The pricing is on the higher end but reasonable for what ThoughtSpot offers.
What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?
ThoughtSpot lacks an intermediate layer for data loading, unlike Qlik, which affects dashboard stability when the database has issues. The platform also has fewer formulas and functions compared to...
What is your primary use case for ThoughtSpot?
I am working for a telecommunication company where we use ThoughtSpot ( /products/thoughtspot-reviews ) to create monthly, weekly, and daily ad hoc reports for business needs. We work for both B2B ...
 

Comparisons

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs
Find out what your peers are saying about Birst vs. ThoughtSpot and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.