BrightGauge vs. Infor Birst

BrightGauge lets us know when we have critical issues that need solving. A massive influx of tickets all at the same time triggers an investigation. Usually, it is tied to a server going down, which we can address. It would not be helpful for a small MSP or IT department with just a few daily tickets. The stats are better used to track a large amount of clients.

Incentivized

Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics are well suited for advanced analytics and business intelligence. It has flexible deployment features and a lot of configuration ability with low code - no coding ability. Ability to ingest data from multiple live data sources. Source data from multiple sources can be segregated into multiple sections based on business criteria. Easily searchable business terms (metadata) across all enterprise analytic content.

• SQL queries can be presented in many different ways to illustrate the data. They can be used in lists, graphs, meter, etc.
• The datasets frequency of updates can be customized to from 5 minutes to annually. It's very granular in this respect.
• It allows dashboards to be shared outside your organization with clients, partners, and vendors to maximize collaboration and reporting.

Incentivized

• End-to-end solution, from raw source data, ETL, warehousing and reporting, Birst is able to do everything we need in one package instead of needing to develop and maintain multiple technologies
• Intuitive report development. The drag and drop creation of reports is simple. More complicated queries are easy to generate.
• Very user-friendly and interactive. A lot of nice features are available both for developers and end users to streamline the process of preparing and consuming data
• Rich API which allows us to programmatically interact with Birst

Incentivized

• Annual or more than annualized data is desperately needed for MSPs to show trends, current limitation is previous 240 days for ConnectWise tickets
• Alerts when datasets do not sync properly, I have to rely on my team to notice vs get an automated alert from BrightGauge
• Small thing, but it would be nice to have more options on the report scheduler to enable a start date. If you wish to do it quarterly, you have to start the schedule exactly 3 months from the next run.

Incentivized

• Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly
• Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data
• Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI

Incentivized

We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.

Usability is BrightGauge's strength. Granting the ability of virtually any user to be able to create a dashboard is incredibly valuable. If an organization very simple and straight forward reporting needs then BrightGauge is a perfect fit for them. Connecting to the dataset we used was very quick and easy and I imagine it would be the same for any major data source you would like to pull from.

Incentivized

I would like to see additional usability put into the ETL scripting. Recently, Birst added a nice function reference inline to formula creation which has kept me from having to return to documentation so much. The same in ETL would be very beneficial. The interface problems related to the Flex framework are being addressed in a rewrite to HTML 5, but for now they are still a hindrance to a higher usability rating.

We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer

Everything runs very fast and smoothly. The only process that I wish was faster would be processing the data after uploading new data or making changes to the existing data model. It can take 15-20 minutes (roughly) to upload and process new data once you start getting into 10's of millions of rows. Given my experience with how long it takes me to pull the same data using SQL Server Management Studio, I don't think Birst is unreasonably slow - but for me to give a higher rating, I would want it to be unreasonably fast

Anytime I have reached out to the BrightGauge support team they have been quick, responsive, and solved my issue. They go out of their way to be helpful!

Incentivized

When we have an issue that is stopping our business from proceeding, I want answers sooner than later. While Birst does have a published response time for each case level, we always wish it could be quicker. What response improvement could there be with a larger support team? In response to first question: Blackhole of issues - Birst needs to improve upon closing issues that resolution was dependent upon code fixes or enhancements, perhaps someone to add a comment on all case tickets at least every 60 days. Escalation - I always have the ability to electronically or via phone escalate a ticket. I also have my Customer Success Manager through whom I can escalate topics.

I have attended two different training sessions. The first one was my initial training on the system. It was well paced, clear and concise. If there were questions that were not able to be answered by the instructor, he took down the question and actually followed up and provided us a response quickly. The second session was specific to the dashboard and report design components. This training was very good though there were some attendants who had little or no experience and their questions slowed the class.

Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.

Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.

I'm not aware of any other competitors to Bright Gauge that we selected. They seem to be very close to managed IT service providers and have been great at tailoring their support to the PSAs like ConnectWise, AutoTask, etc. I can see Bright Gauge getting more and more popular as time goes by

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.

Incentivized

we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this

• We were purchased by a large PE firm because we could easily show CSAT ratings.
• The easily trackable stats are suitable for the C-Suite to see which division is the most profitable.
• We won 60,000 MRR by displaying to potential customers how we track important issues with the gauges.

Incentivized

• Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
• Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.

Incentivized