Infor Birst Reviews & Insights

Score5.3 out of 10

186 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Infor Birst are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Highly versatile and user-friendly: Users have found Birst to be a highly versatile and user-friendly business intelligence tool. They appreciate the intuitive user interface, which makes tasks easy to perform. Many reviewers have mentioned that even users with limited technical skills can quickly navigate the platform and start using its features effectively.

Knowledgeable and proactive support: Many users highly value the knowledgeable and proactive support provided by Birst. The support team is responsive and helpful in providing excellent guidance. Reviewers have expressed satisfaction with their interactions with the support team, highlighting their expertise in resolving issues promptly.

Customizable user interface: Users appreciate the customizable user interface of Birst, which allows them to tailor the platform to their changing business needs. The flexibility of the interface is seen as a major advantage by several reviewers who mention being able to personalize dashboards, reports, and visualizations according to their specific requirements.

Infor Birst Reviews

99 Reviews

A good software with limited capabilities I believe

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

May 19, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We implemented it for our customers to provide them visibility on our product. It was used to build reports and dashboards based on data we have in our tool (procurement tool). One of the primary purpose of Birst OEM was to show the value added by using our procurement tool.

Pros

Reporting Capability
Reporting Customization
Drill down

Cons

Data Model
Very slow tool
Joint between different tables

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited: simple reporting requirements / drill downs. Quite easy to use once you have followed a small training. Less appropriate: Creating complex reports, mixing information between different tables is often not possible. Responsiveness is usually quite slow. Sometimes the tool crashes and it is not saving what you did and can be very annoying, I've found.

Verified User

Consultant in Professional Services (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics - Best BI product.

Rating: 9 out of 10

May 3, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Infor Birst OEM and Embedded Analytics are used for advanced and complex BI reporting and management information for warehousing and sales functions in the organization. Market leader for BI products and easy-to-use reporting features. Good view on data mind maps for source and target data mapping without code use. End-user can map source and target with relationships for reporting.

Pros

Automated data refinement.
Deliver data as a service (DaaS) model.
Support users through guided self service to data objects and semantic definitions.

Cons

Integration with other applications.
Ability for customization to suit business needs and requirements.
Workflow for business rules.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Tamanna Agarwal

Human Resources Analyst in Human Resources at Accenture (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Speed + Accuracy = INCREASED ROI

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 28, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to create product data and analytics faster to spend more time on growing the business. We spent so much time rebuilding frameworks for so many clients that it was a department of itself. Now that has changed.

Pros

Full stack data
Higher adoption rates
Getting product to market faster

Cons

More customization
responsive

Likelihood to Recommend

The ease to create new dashboard is really impressive and simplicity to gather data and make them available to end-users are key factors for projects success. It work great when you move the data inside Birst, but there are limitations for Live enviroments. end-users are key factors for projects success.

Verified User

Executive in Corporate (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

A simple to use and effective business intelligence solution

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Birst for all analytics and reporting needs across the entire company

Pros

Easy Data Warehouse Modeling
Rapid Report and Dashboard Development
Convenient Scheduled Reports

Cons

Fixing various bugs
Improving support
Quality of life changes

Likelihood to Recommend

Birst is great for rapid learning and development, and for taking the place of a data warehouse, ETL tool, and data visualization platform

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Birst used to meet an analytics requirement for our clients

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Birst is used as an analytics platform for our clients in addition to our existing ERP. Our clients had a need for an analytics solution and Birst was the most suitable platform that met our requirements. On top of data from the ERP, we are networking with data from other sources and bring them together in a single, unified product. Our client's experience involves interactive dashboards and emailed reports. These dashboards are being used across our client's organizations.

Pros

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

Cons

Unable to develop snowflake schemas
Occasional slowness of the dashboards due to load on the cloud server
Report distribution sometimes fails, with not all recipients receiving reports on time
Spaces will occasionally get stuck in a processing or copying state, which means we have to wait for Birst Support to release it before we can proceed with publishing new data

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Birst, a data visualization tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 13, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Birst a number of different ways. The first is to help our customer visualize their data. A majority of customers do not have the expertise to build these reports and visualizations so have done this for them. Our customers can use these reports to better understand their products, how they behave and function. We also use Birst internally to monitor how many devices have been deployed on our networks. We can monitor device transactions, API calls and much more. Within our organization, many departments use the Birst. From Sales, Customer Success, Product, marketing, and engineering.

Pros

Customization of reports
Embedded in existing dashboard
Scalability of reports and amount of data it can process
Variety of visualizations/graphs to view data
Variety of filters to drill down to a specific set of data

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Birst is great for visualizing large amounts of data. They provide a number of different visuals to help better understand data. They are very good at descriptive data, however, if you would like to get into predictive or preemptive analytics, another tool might be better suited.

Verified User

Manager in Product Management (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

3 years of experience

Birst review

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

March 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Birst as a visualization tool for selling our analytical services to our clients. It was used by multiple people internally (data models, visualizations, and analysis) and externally by clients.

Pros

The flow of visualizations.

Cons

Latency
Ease of use
Ability to learn how to quickly use the tool
Difficulty in the integration of multiple data sources (Excel, JSON, web)

Likelihood to Recommend

Not appropriate for citizen development.

Verified User

Executive (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

1 year of experience

Birst in eLearning Sales and Ops

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Birst internally to analyze sales and marketing data to improve our marketing efforts (ROI on digital marketing spend) and to provide insights to our eLearning operations team.
Our marketing team analyzes time series of marketing spend vs the revenue received attributable to that spend and adjusts digital campaigns to optimize ROI.
The operations team extract student engagement data from our LMS and identifies students at risk of not completing their coursework in a timely fashion so that they can engage with them to identify issues and assist.

Pros

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.

Cons

The Birst product uses it's own query language (BQL) which we feel has been implemented in different ways in different parts of the product.
This makes learning the entire product more difficult than it ought to be.
The Birst idea of grains and hierarchies is hard to get a foothold on. I don't think I completely get it yet.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are looking for "Instant BI", Birst isn't that tool.
If you want to roll your own solution using a single application to perform all of your ETL, reporting/dashboard, like to get deep in the weeds and have a lot of control of how your data is processed, this is going to make you smile.

Sean Keesler

Business Analyst in Marketing at eCornell (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

BIRSTed ahead of the competition during the vetting process!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have embedded Birst into our SaaS offering to be used by our customers as one of their reporting options. We have embedded it both in minor dashlets on single record pages for a quick view of how records are doing and as a larger dashboard for more details and advanced reports. We also analyze some of our own statistics in Birst.

Pros

Customer adoption and success are important to Birst. They have positions dedicated to our success, worked to making sure we knew how to solve our problems once we were past implementation, and have regular contact even after. Purchasing the TAM program increases that.
Attractive reports that render quickly.

Cons

Using the cloud offering we have had spaces malfunction, especially if we try to upload data and process them on a frequent basis. They seemed to have fixed this with one of their most recent releases and with us reducing the frequency we upload data (twice a day rather than every hour), but there are still occasional issues.
Learning curve - Trying to figure out how to do things in a new system that I could do in seconds in SQL is a bit frustrating. The help, community, and our TAM rep helps with this, but it still happens.

Likelihood to Recommend

Processing your own well-defined datasets seems to work well. Trying to process more dynamic sets where the data is not well defined (customer defined fields) is not impossible, but takes a lot more work arounds and tricks.

Working with trend data works well. Trying to report on real-time operational data is more tricky due to the time it takes to process your space. I have not used some of their direct connection offerings that might help alleviate that though.

Verified User

Strategist in Product Management (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

BIrst - meeting challenges head on.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

March 21, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are an OEM of Birst. We embed Birst into our SaaS offering.

Our SaaS offering is a mobile application that allows users to fill out advanced forms for data collection on activities they are performing during there work. We collect, extract and transform the data into a Birst data model and provide dashboards and reports to our users using Birst.

We provide dashboards and visualizations that provide insights into Field Operations, Customer Satisfaction, Service Quality, Quality of Work, and Field Coordination for the purpose of root cause analysis across these "areas of analysis".

Pros

Birst provides a very scalable and high-performance BI Platform. Setting up a new project "space" is simple, fast and easy to manage.
Birst provides a deep and comprehensive ETL and query capability to perform most any data transformation.
Building out Dashboards is easy. Building new reports with the Visualization tool is easy and powerful.

Cons

More visualization options and smarter 'auto' generated views.
Predictive modeling.
More contemporary look and feel to the Admin portal using HTML 5.

Likelihood to Recommend

Birst is a great tool for supporting well-governed analytics data modeling. It has a good balance between the effort required by an IT/ETL specialist and business analysts and reports writers.
Birst does not shy away from the challenges of data governance and stewardship vs the dangers of "quick and easy" departmental or project specific analytic projects where business rules are "invented" vs managed and data cube chaos can quickly become a big IT problem.

David Strutt

Director, Analtyics and Data Management Products in Product Management at ProntoForms (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

4 years of experience

View profile

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Birst used to meet an analytics requirement for our clients

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 10, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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

Cons

Unable to develop snowflake schemas
Occasional slowness of the dashboards due to load on the cloud server
Report distribution sometimes fails, with not all recipients receiving reports on time
Spaces will occasionally get stuck in a processing or copying state, which means we have to wait for Birst Support to release it before we can proceed with publishing new data

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience