Infor Birst vs. OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting

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

iHub is a decent enough environment that it serves our needs. We can have unlimited users and it can tie into AD although we do not use that feature currently. It is a decent place to store all of the reports in one location, even though for us it is not visually appealing to the end users. iHub is not a place where you want to create robust/interactive dashboards for end users to drill through and follow a "story".

Incentivized

• 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

• It is fairly easy to set the sharing rules for a report/dashboard.
• They have a decent amount of time frame options for setting a schedule to generate a report.
• The support is mostly helpful and timely if you have an issue.

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

• Setting up a "dashboard" is extremely lacking in functionality. The different chart widgets you place on the page do not interact with each other. When you select an item from one do not expect it to highlight or filter another.
• The speed and stability are not great, but maybe that is just our environment not being up to snuff...even though we are above the "recommended" settings.
• The main GUI for a user is TERRIBLE. You log into a File Tree format where you have to navigate folders to reach the correct dashboard. There are ways around this, but it would either require an expensive payment to the Professional Services team to revamp to UI or another option they gave us was to create the "Default Dashboard" and provide that link to users and in that Dashboard, you use a new tab to include the navigation back to the main screen so that at least on the initial load the user is taken to a friendly looking dashboard instead of a file tree.

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.

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

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

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.

• 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

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 instance of iHub does not stack up against the other larger BI tools out today. It is a good place to store reports in a central location that allows users to run very specific reports on demand, but it is not a place I would want to store all of my "dashboards". As far as holding individual reports that are specific to an individual need, it is a great tool. If you want to create a report that will be used as a Template for a Form or a Label, iHub is a good choice to store and schedule the report or call it via API to generate it and return it to your calling app.

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