Birst Enterprise BI & Analytics

A new tool that needs to improve some things...keep going

It may seem like we don't like the tool, but it is very good. The cons are mostly pain felt by the developers. End users will not notice an issue. Make sure you know that your end users will not be able to create any complex reports easily. BQL is very useful but there is no way a non-Developer will be able to just pick it up and go. A lot of these issues may be resolved in 2018...especially the egregious use of the defunct Flash technology. The tool does so many things that we use it exclusively to do everything from data modelling, report creation , security, dashboards, etc. And you cannot overstate the importance of their terrific customer support - especially the Birst Community. So the Cons is a long list of relatively minor quibbles. yur developers will grumble, but overall, it is an excellent tool.

Overall experience with Birst is good as a developer. Great visualization capabilities and faster analytics with huge amount of data. Happy Birsting!!!

The user community is amazing. Post a question and get five ways to make it happen within an hour!

Birst has been a great way to bring together the data from the many platforms that our company uses.

Birst has proven to meet or exceed our expectations in most areas. The visualizer and dashboard tools are simple to use. The admin tool is in flash and it is a little clunky at times, but it gets the job done and the complexity is hidden from our end users which was a key goal for us. We are embedding it in our software and we were looking for a solution that excelled in visualization while also providing scalable management capabilities. Birst provides the full breadth of what we need while most other tools only provided a part of our full needs.

Birst has continued to evolve within its nitch; focused deliverables.

Having a fully integrated data store and data warehouse is a great value. Data connectivity is also very powerful while simple. Lastly Visualizer's interface is very intuitive and easy for adoption. The capability to carve out a topic, build it and deploy stand-alone supports great time-to-market. The Network BI capability allows you to come back and merge, enhance. Very flexible.

I'm a Birst Cloud customer for over 3 years now and through time they have much improved and advanced in technology, performance and ease of use. They are constantly are adding new features , their support and services are great and mainly - they listen to what you have to say. Their community is bringing people and employees together, sharing ideas and solutions. Thumbs up

Birst is a suitable tool to review data without implementing the data in a data warehouse. it is possible to establish real-time connections to several databases or do the modeling directly in Birst. In some situations, you can see that the tool is still in its infancy but the support always finds a solution, however, it looks likes (as long as the source of interruption is critical to your business). In my opinion, the admin area (modeling) is the least developed area compared to the visualization frontend and still runs (until Birst 6) on the flash basis with sometimes causes synchronization errors between the database and the front-end. You can do modeling as you like with some limitations in the schemas. Birst can process star and snowflakes but has some problems with multi-fact tables and different aggregation levels in one table (data mart design. in Cognos they call this feature "Determinants"). Nevertheless, it is easy for anyone with a little modeling knows how to build a simple model and report their data. A person who does not anything about SQL or data would have a lot of troubles with modeling which isn't a disadvantage in my opinion but should be noticed. Birst is pretty limited when it comes to "security" in different ways: You can set a data security on row level and assign user groups or variables to it but it's pretty complicated for nondatabase developers or architects. our analysts (who do some modeling) had a hard time understanding the security until this task was assigned to us architects. This should be made simpler for every third-class technician to understand. You are able to grant a user access to the admin area or deny it. you cannot grant access to just some features like upload images and add users. In my opinion, this a limitation and always requires a space admin to do stuff that a normal visualizer can't do. If you want a user to import images or something then he must have space admin permissions and therefore he can make changed on the model which contradicts to a row level security if set. The user management really is limited. you're missing a lot of creation/deletion functions and you must always access a space command window to do so. therefore you have troubles to mass create/delete users without using the API. You have to do a lot of extra work to manage your users efficiently. The frontend is pretty good and you can do a lot of visualizations. You can choose between simple charts from "visualizer" or build pixel perfect reports from "designer". You can add both report types to a selection of dashboards. Dashboards can be secured via user groups but only for space admins which always involves a space admin a slightly contradicts to a self-services solution. All in all, Birst is an ETL and visualization tool that allows you so simply add files to your data warehouse and do some reporting. As more complex, your model becomes as more limitations you face while modeling. If you use live access connections the SQL's created are executed on the corresponding database. therefore you face fewer limitations than modeling within Birst. we personally prefer to model with live access. Even if the tool is on some parts in its infancy the Birst community and support is pretty awesome and without this the tool wouldN't be satisfying but it exists and therefore I grant 4 of 5 starts for this tool.