Infor Birst vs. Yellowfin

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

We can recommend this software without hesitation, as it has the ability to generate reports and data analysis, as well as process the data automatically, which saves time. It is ideal for small and medium-sized companies that wish to improve their services in the business world

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

• The Yellowfin user interface fits seamlessly into our own web software as it too is designed in the latest web technologies making it easy to use and easily accessible to our client base.
• The Yellowfin user interface is intuitive and easy to use, elevating VSV clients from needing in-depth training on the product before true value can be realised.
• The Yellowfin architecture supports the Pintl architecture 100% due to a similar design strategy and as such no real overhead is added to the Pintl system for the addition of the Yellowfin product nor does it add any additional IT overhead to be used.
• The Yellowfin product is quick and simple to develop reports and dashboards in cutting turn-around-time at the VSV development team and when new/custom reports are required by VSV clients.

• 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

• The ability to predefine a colour for a specific graph as a selection option dynamically.
• The ability to customise the label of a chart, especially with respect to performance related reporting graphs we need an increase in dynamic charting options to meet our more specialised requirements.

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

Yellowfin has large promises that did not meet our expectations after we got it installed. We tried to configure it but things did not go as planned. After 1 year of trying - we still cannot get it working. Be very careful when signing up with them - everything is not what it seems.

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

99.9% availability

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

Anytime I needed a report, I ran into issues with this software. We used Yellowfin for a period of months, having switched from Salesforce. I found the reports were difficult to produce, and the data management was okay at best.

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

Yellowfin provides 3 levels of training to support consumers, business analytics, developers and Administrations :

1. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 1 (Exploration)
2. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 2 (Advanced)
3. Yellowfin BI Training - Level 3(Expert)

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.

Web-based training for large audiences for Level 1 and Level 2 I would suggest

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.

Design the data model and views for each dashboard is very important and it is the success factor Configuration of cluster for large implementation

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.

Yellowfin is no doubt, a stronger, more eloquent and polished tool compared to Microsoft's Power BI. The issue with our company specifically is that we are a big Microsoft shop, and pay for Power BI more or less in our bundle esp w/ O365. While the Yellowfin tool is a more sleek tool, the cost to our company is something that we have to weight against a negligible cost with Power BI.

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

- Tested 500 con-current users in Linux platform with 4 cores systems - Tested with cloud based VM - Tested with 1000 reads per minutes

• 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

• made our org more data centric
• Decisions are made based on data vs opinion
• has created a single source of truth for the bulk of the organization

Incentivized