Infor Birst vs. Mediafly

Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.

Incentivized

If all of your data isn't consolidated in one place, this product is less appropriate. If your company or team structure isn't yet developed to the point where you have well defined sales targets based on historical data and accurate forecasting, many of the benefits of Insight Squared's data analysis could be lost on you. Ask yourself first if your sales team is at the point where you're ready to utilise data analytics to scale your sales effectively.

• Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
• Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.

Incentivized

• I love the flexibility that InsightSquared has to offer. We have a number of Salesforce fields that are used in different ways because we aren't strictly a sales company. They have been helping us from the beginning to figure out the best ways to organize our data to get the information we're looking for.
• The Dashboards within the system are great. I wish we used them better than we currently do, but that is a growth area for us. As the admin, I have the capability to setup dashboards for different users who may not be as tech-savy. This is huge because I can play around with them and experiment before we implement for the user.

• 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

• I'd love to see the user interface available in other languages, especially Spanish.
• As an administrator, I would like to be able to make more customizations myself. I believe this is on their roadmap.
• When I create a new user in Salesforce, I would like to be able to force InsightSquared to update and immediately enable the new user rather than wait for the normally scheduled update to appear in their system. Right now, it takes about a day for the new user to appear in InsightSquared.

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.

The usefulness of InsightSquared on a day to day basis. Mind you, I don't know of comparable products (other than the Salesforce dashboard, which I'm not a huge fan of; InsightSquared is sexier), so that is also a factor. If I was approached by a vendor with a similar solution and maybe less expensive? It would definitely be a conversation to have

Birst is a reliable BI platform that has developed through uploads via the cloud, easy tabular views, quick manual uploads and links to SQL databases. It however does not compete with other BI tools with the data manipulation and connections when your data is uploaded in the platform and the visualisation and customisations available. The automation aspect is very useful and is one of the top features, alongside the user hierarchy and permissions. Birst is an easy and useful tool for finicial reporting, however is not currently the best option on the market for providing easy to understand, edit and present visualisations.

Incentivized

InsightSquared is easy to use overall. Running reports and creating dashboards is quick and easy - drag and drop functionality. All reports have multi-filter options allowing you to drill down into your data. Scorecards for employees help show how quickly a rep can start selling after they join your team. Activity ratios provide insight into what it takes from a KPI standpoint to close a deal.

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

Every time I go to use InsightSquared it has been available and fully functional

In a reporting and analytics package there are two distinct performance times to look at. First is the performance of calculating the report data and metrics. I would rate a 9 for this. However, the interface rendering is slow, rating a 7. Dashboards can take 3-5 seconds to load. This is probably not a problem for normal users, as the dashboard render is performed once. My application integrated the dashboard into a commercial product though, with hundreds of customers - so my demands are higher with a large number of end users.

The Best

• Poor turnaround time
• Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
• Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
• Lack of inter team work noticed
• Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time

Incentivized

InsightSquared has a very responsive team, and always willing to help with reporting needs which are not able to be completed in house. They do offer a professional services team at an additional cost, so if your reporting is very complex, or you have a team that is continuously changing the type of metrics they require as a business, their support team will be an invaluable asset for you.

Incentivized

I went to their annual user conference (Birst Forward) and their standard training class (Birst Boot Camp) this year, and both were excellent. Very educational, and I got all of the personal attention I needed to get my questions about my specific answered. I've also reached out to the trainers after those events to ask more questions, and they've been great about getting back to me with answers

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.

Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics have low-code no-code features which are easy to deploy and with easy instances creation with a dev-quality-production environment. Good capability on data mapping features from source to intermediate to target with impressive metadata management.

Our internal SF team looked at some alternatives that Salesforce already provides, as well as Tableau which we use internally. InsightSquared is preferred within our org because it is tailored for sales analytics and is easy to get up and running with meaningful components quickly if our leadership needs to get specific graphs.

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

• 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

• Since implementing Mediafly we have seen 140% higher ARR in deals.
• Win rates have increased by 45%.
• Our value consultants are able to take on 2x more deals at a time.

Incentivized