Infor Birst vs. ThoughtSpot

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

By using the power of cloud platforms like bigquery or snowflake, ThoughtSpot can deliver performance at scale ensuring that even the largest organization can quickly analyze and visualize data. The ability to seamlessly share live dashboards fosters collaborations, ensuring everyone in the organization is working from the same data source and aligned in decision making.

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

• Beautiful visualizations. The visuals are distinct, clean, and easy to discern from one another.
• Intelligent querying functionality. When looking to manipulate the data, the search function makes it easy to manipulate the features in the data, along with aggregating them in the way you'd like.
• Embedding! It has been a smooth process thus far for our product & technical teams to work with ThoughtSpot and bring it into our product.

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

• It would be great if ThoughtSpot can add the feature to filter by clicking on visualizations. i.e if I click on a particular data point in the chart if the full dashboard can filter just for that particular data point.
• Color coding the heatmap with different colors like green to orange to red.

Incentivized

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.

We have had success with the initial use cases and there are more use cases that can receive return on investment. I don't give it a 10 because other products like Tableau are building functionality that may start to compete in the coming years.

Incentivized

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

The tool is easy to use if you know what you are doing and looking for. I know as they work towards improvements and simple language it will become even easier, but as of now they are doing a great job but there is room for improvement.

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

it's available unless there is a server or system update etc. sometimes the timing of this is bad (for example during a month end close)

Incentivized

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.

It does what it is supposed to. Would be nice to have a bit more insights

Incentivized

• 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

I give it this meeting because the team is not only help able to help us in the current solutions but also amazing and taking feedback and feeding it back to their development team which includes more products and features into ThoughtSpot

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

inhouse in-person training. Took a bit to long to get the basics.

Incentivized

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.

poor instructions

Incentivized

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.

Understand use case and model and design accordingly

Incentivized

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 is more flexible and PowerBI, easier work online, and share information with many users. Also the dashboards and beautiful, and the user experience is better. Performance used to be faster. We use Looker for different use cases but, when it comes to reporting and sharing information, ThoughSpot is much better.

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

Because it is very reliable, inside the situation, we need strong internet connection to access a lot of data but easily never had any downtime except during the upgrades

Incentivized

• 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

• Time to market ROI is massive vs hiring the full-time dedicated team to build and maintain a frontend multi-tenant SaaS data viz product.
• It will be interesting to see over time how the advanced features play out in terms of usability and end value, such as Natural Search, which we are very excited about, and the machine learning tools.

Incentivized