Infor Birst vs. Klipfolio Klips

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

It's
a piece of software that's capable of almost anything. Dynamic variables can be
changed in real-time via the interface's UI/UX and UI/UX customizations. As a
result, it can always keep its database up-to-date and obtain the most current
information from a variety of sources. The Klip customer service team is
extremely friendly and helpful. Every time a problem with the Klip setup
arises, they're there to help. As a result of their activities, they try to
work with the group's experience.

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

• Dashboard design. Super simple and easy to set up, move and size components, and display.
• Klip creation. This is report/chart creation. Klipfolio straddles the line well between ease-of-use and robust capability for data crunching and visualization.
• Data sync. I have had very few data sync issues. The sync just works and it is very light-weight on API calls.
• Multiple data source formats. You can make data sources in JSON, Summarized View, and Detailed View.
• Modeled data sources. You can create modeled versions of any data source, which allows you to lock in data formats, add columns (including formula columns), and more.
• Team permissions. I have been able to set team permission sets and use that to display the given dashboards around the office. With this, I can control who has access to which data.
• Chart options. There is a great selection of chart types to choose from.
• Great support. Their support staff has always been very responsive—almost always immediate. I have always been able to resolve my issues with them.

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

• Onboarding. The process of setting up a new client for a dashboard can be a little tedious.
• File size upload and third-party integrations. I have been limited to the size of the .csv file we were uploading but we were able to find a workaround.

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

My initial impressions of the software have been extremely positive. There are YouTube tutorials that explain how to make klips. The intuitive design of the UI It appears that everything in this software has been thoroughly tested to create all the visualizations that can be imagined as well as the user input controls that allow users to have exactly the data they want to be displayed in seconds, considering the various functions and formulas available in the Excel integrations and the extensive list of other services that can be integrated.

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

It provides all the necessary information to be able to carry out the analysis of any type of business, to know how money is managed virtually, what to do to have greater visibility, in addition to being a platform that is always accessible and allows continuous and efficient work.

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.

None at all; just be sure of what information you will need for working.

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.

It was clear that Klipfolio had the edge in terms of the number of third-party connectors and templates available, allowing us to quickly be up and running with various API integrations and visually stunning designs in only an hour. It was a no-brainer for us, and we're glad we went with them instead of the other options.

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

• Klipfolio not only delivers great-looking dashboards, but it makes our agency look awesome to our clients!
• Klipfolio is one of the few platforms that we have implemented where the minimal investment has consistently provided maximum results in the return on our investment.
• Not only had Klipfolio proven to be a fiscally smart - money-saving - move, but has also proven to be a great time saver as well.
• Thanks to Klipfolio we spend less time having to pull data and have more time to analyze and strategize for our reporting and recommendations to our clients.

Incentivized