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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Infor Birst

    Score5.3 out of 10
    N/AInfor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.N/A

    Tableau Desktop

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/ATableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.

    $75

    per month

    Pricing
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Tableau
    $75
    per month per user
    Tableau Enterprise
    $115
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsAll pricing plans are billed annually.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    Considered Both Products
    Infor
    Chose Infor Birst
    We compared Birst vs Tableau and Lumirra and there's no question that Birst is the best option from a cost perspective. Additionally, the ease of use complemented with our support team has allowed us to innovate on the platform quickly
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We evaluated and compared Birst, OBIEE 12c, and Tableau based on several criteria such as "Data Analysis & Discovery", "Data Integration", "Security model", "Data Visualization", "User Experience" or "Infrastructure & Architecture".
    The only point where Birst was rated higher …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst provide a much better web UI and end user experience and distribution mechanism than both Tableau and SSRS. Power BI simply did not have the full complement of features that we needed at the time of our selection to be competitive and Pentaho was too custom and would have …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    • Birst lacks external modular components power bi has currently. New custom visuals, charts, statistical models created by third party vendors can be added to existing dashboard and enhanced.
    • Birst lacks interactive dashboard functionality and external inputs.
    • Powerbi and Tableau
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Tableau does not have a common semantic layer like BIRST does so we use Tableau for data discovery purposes and BIRST for enterprise BI.
    Within BIRST, we can increase the level of data governance.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Both Tableau and Qlik needed back end data preparation done before they could start. BIRST has that full process integrated. Most importantly, BIRST's fully integrated stack (we chose the cloud option) allows you to focus on delivering what your organization needs, without …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We preferred to have an all-in-one cloud solution that could connect to Salesforce.com and on-premise servers. I thought the combination of ETL built into a star-schema was unmatched. QlikView could do something similar, but the resulting data file was not an enterprise grade …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst is the best all in one tool that we found, especially at a good price point and already using Infor
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    There are a few items I evaluate when looking at different tools.
    1. Price per user
    2. License price
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    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" …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst was the only tool that did the following:
    • robust enough ETL for our data warehouse team
    • data would remain within our data warehouse and not within the tool's proprietary store, in case the company went out of business.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We originally selected Birst because they are a Partner of our ERP system provider. We re-evaluated and reconfirmed that decision after our new investment through a one week prototyping exercise that proved how quickly something that delivers real content and value can be built …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We selected Birst over all other options due to the one-stop-shop nature of their offering - it allows us to rapidly develop and deploy a complete product quickly within a single tool.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Visualizations between the two are comparable. Processing and data access seems to be a bit faster with MS. Building dashboards is about the same, with Birst seeming to be a bit simpler (but that might be because I use it more). Have used Tableau and Spotfire and the …
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst allows direct access to an internal data store, which none of the products we evaluated provided. We also found the birst ETL layer far more powerful than the other platforms we considered.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    • Value for money
    • Birst was by far less expensive than the other tools evaluated in regards the KPIs defined
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We needed multi-tenancy, embedding, scalability and preferred a cloud solution that removed the need for us to manage upgrades.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    - Great could solution.
    - Modern UI for Dashboards.
    Incentivized
    Chose Infor Birst
    We looked at Tableau and few others.
    Chose Infor Birst

    There isn't a single tool that does everything Birst does. It's an end to end solution with unrivaled flexibility.

    • Choice of back end databases (including Redshift, HANA, Microsoft, Oracle, Infobright, etc).
    Chose Infor Birst
    Tableau is the leader in visualizations, from animation to ease of use, it takes the cake. But they do not (did not) have the data modeling capabilities that were offered with Birst. The step back in visualizations from Birst is more than made up for in their modeling. Qlik is …
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst does a great job of being able to collate the data.
    Chose Infor Birst
    We chose birst for the cloud based collaboration feature
    Chose Infor Birst
    Birst back end is more powerful yet complicated while Tableau's front end is more user friendly
    Tableau
    Chose Tableau Desktop
    Tableau Desktop has many more features than other competitors. Comparing Birst, the layout is much more efficient. Power BI and QlikView are as easy as Tableau Desktop. The price for Tableau is a disadvantage when compared to Birst and QlikView, but not against Power BI. …
    Incentivized
    Chose Tableau Desktop
    It is easier to start with Tableau. The out of the box ready feel is more with Tableau than any of the other BI products. Product scalability is at a steep cost with Tableau but it gives the possibility to begin small and then grow as it proves its capability as compared to all …
    Incentivized
    Chose Tableau Desktop
    Tableau is the only tool that can be exposed to end users so that they can build their reports and dashboards and can publish these without the help of a dedicated developer.
    Incentivized
    Chose Tableau Desktop
    Cass evaluated Domo, QlikView and Birst prior to selecting Tableau. It came down to cost (and by a significant margin); the others have relatively high implementation, hosting and other costs. Additionally, based on a recent Gartner "Magic Quadrant", Tableau exceeds all others …
    Incentivized
    Chose Tableau Desktop
    We were interested in expedience at reasonable cost and so didn't do any sort of bakeoff, but tried Tableau first as a potential solution for moving beyond Excel for large scale data analytics. We picked it because it more than met our functional needs at a very reasonable …
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Would buy again
    51 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Delivers good value for the price
    49 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    54 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    37 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    43 Answers
    Features
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    BI Standard Reporting
    Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.4
    77 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.3
    167 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Pixel Perfect reports7.068 Ratings8.8139 Ratings
    Customizable dashboards8.077 Ratings8.4166 Ratings
    Report Formatting Templates7.159 Ratings7.8145 Ratings
    Ad-hoc Reporting
    Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    7.0
    78 Ratings
    14% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.7
    164 Ratings
    8% above category average
    Drill-down analysis8.078 Ratings8.6159 Ratings
    Formatting capabilities7.077 Ratings9.2162 Ratings
    Integration with R or other statistical packages6.127 Ratings7.7122 Ratings
    Report sharing and collaboration7.068 Ratings9.2157 Ratings
    Report Output and Scheduling
    Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.0
    75 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.1
    158 Ratings
    3% below category average
    Publish to Web8.052 Ratings7.3149 Ratings
    Publish to PDF8.067 Ratings7.9149 Ratings
    Report Versioning7.28 Ratings8.2116 Ratings
    Report Delivery Scheduling9.066 Ratings9.2123 Ratings
    Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.073 Ratings
    Data Discovery and Visualization
    Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    6.9
    72 Ratings
    14% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.4
    156 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.072 Ratings9.0154 Ratings
    Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.058 Ratings8.2149 Ratings
    Predictive Analytics5.833 Ratings8.6126 Ratings
    Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Access Control and Security
    Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    8.3
    72 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.7
    142 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Multi-User Support (named login)9.070 Ratings9.0139 Ratings
    Role-Based Security Model8.068 Ratings8.0119 Ratings
    Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.069 Ratings8.8129 Ratings
    Report-Level Access Control00 Ratings9.03 Ratings
    Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings8.877 Ratings
    Mobile Capabilities
    Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    5.0
    54 Ratings
    45% below category average
    Tableau Desktop
    8.0
    135 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Responsive Design for Web Access7.052 Ratings8.2124 Ratings
    Mobile Application3.034 Ratings7.097 Ratings
    Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile3.042 Ratings8.8117 Ratings
    Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
    Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Infor Birst and Tableau Desktop
    Feature
    Infor Birst
    -
    Ratings
    Tableau Desktop
    9.0
    64 Ratings
    14% above category average
    REST API00 Ratings9.256 Ratings
    Javascript API00 Ratings9.051 Ratings
    iFrames00 Ratings9.249 Ratings
    Java API00 Ratings10.046 Ratings
    Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings8.453 Ratings
    Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings8.446 Ratings
    User Ratings
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (96 ratings)
    8.7
    (194 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (35 ratings)
    8.9
    (39 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (12 ratings)
    8.6
    (63 ratings)
    Availability
    4.1
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (10 ratings)
    Performance
    7.5
    (6 ratings)
    6.1
    (9 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.0
    (19 ratings)
    7.0
    (56 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    5.3
    (6 ratings)
    8.0
    (34 ratings)
    Configurability
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.1
    (2 ratings)
    Data Sharing and Collaboration
    6.0
    (24 ratings)
    8.4
    (115 ratings)
    Data Sources
    7.6
    (76 ratings)
    7.9
    (115 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    6.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Infor BirstTableau Desktop
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Tableau
    The best scenario is definitely to collect data from several sources and create dedicated dashboards for specific recipients. However, I miss the possibility of explaining these reports in more detail. Sometimes, we order a report, and after half a year, we don't remember the meaning of some data (I know it's our fault as an organization, but the tool could force better practices).
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Infor
    • 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
    Read full review
    Tableau
    • An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
    • Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Infor
    • 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
    Read full review
    Tableau
    • Pricing should be more user-friendly and usage-driven
    • Making edits to the production reports is fairly tough and has a vast scope of additional capabilities
    • Tableau Desktop should be able to differentiate itself from the Tableau server else there is no major meaning of two different products being offered
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Tableau
    Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Tableau
    Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Infor
    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
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    Tableau
    When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.
    Read full review
    Performance
    Infor
    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
    Read full review
    Tableau
    Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Infor
    • 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
    Read full review
    Tableau
    Tableau support has been extremely responsive and willing to help with all of our requests. They have assisted with creating advanced analysis and many different types of custom icons, data formatting, formulas, and actions embedded into graphs. Tableau offers a weekly presentation of features and assists with internal company projects.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Tableau
    It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Infor
    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.
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    Tableau
    I think the training was good overall, but it was maybe stating the obvious things that a tech savvy young engineer would be able to pick up themselves too. However, the example work books were good and Tableau web community has helped me with many problems
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Infor
    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.
    Read full review
    Tableau
    Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Infor
    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
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    Tableau
    I have used Power BI as well, the pricing is better, and also training costs or certifications are not that high. Since there is python integration in Power BI where I can use data cleaning and visualizing libraries and also some machine learning models. I can import my python scripts and create a visualization on processed data.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Infor
    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
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    Tableau
    Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.
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    Return on Investment
    Infor
    • 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
    Read full review
    Tableau
    • Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
    • Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
    • Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Infor Birst Screenshots

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