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Birst Reviews

Vendor: Infor
3.7 out of 5
5,977 followers
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What is Birst?

Birst Networked BI and Analytics eliminates information silos. Decentralized users can augment the enterprise data model virtually, as opposed to physically, without compromising data governance.

Get the Birst Buyer's Guide and find out what your peers are saying about Birst, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and more!
Birst is the #16 ranked solution in top Embedded BI Tools and #30 ranked solution in top Reporting Tools. PeerSpot users give Birst an average rating of 7.4 out of 10. Birst is most commonly compared to Microsoft Power BI: Birst vs Microsoft Power BI.
Buyer's Guide
Birst
June 2025
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Birst mindshare

Product category:
Reporting
As of June 2025, the mindshare of Birst in the Reporting category stands at 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year, according to calculations based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting

PeerResearch reports based on Birst reviews

TypeTitleDate
CategoryReportingJun 16, 2025Download
ProductReviews, tips, and advice from real usersJun 16, 2025Download
ComparisonBirst vs Microsoft Power BIJun 16, 2025Download
ComparisonBirst vs TableauJun 16, 2025Download
ComparisonBirst vs IBM CognosJun 16, 2025Download
Suggested products
TitleRatingMindshareRecommending
Microsoft Power BI4.026.4%93%321 interviewsAdd to research
Tableau4.221.7%89%306 interviewsAdd to research
 
 
Key learnings from peers

Valuable Features

Valued features of Birst include robust data visualization, cloud-based scalability, and seamless integration with ERP/CRM systems. The comprehensive suite supports ETL, reporting, and dashboards without additional tools. Networked BI ensures consistent metrics across departments. Birst's intuitive dashboards enhance user interaction while enabling agile development with built-in connectors for quick model deployment. Users appreciate the single-window development, mobile accessibility, and drag-and-drop functionality that facilitate end-to-end BI process with customizable reporting formats.
  • "Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."

Room for Improvement

Birst's performance could benefit from improvements in in-memory processing and real-time streaming to handle complex calculations and large data sets efficiently. Licensing and hidden costs pose challenges with additional connector fees. Customization options in measure calculations and visualization functionalities need enhancement. The user interface lacks intuitiveness, while query generation and the ETL process require optimization. Admin modules and customer support also need updating to enhance user experience and system manageability.
  • "Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."

ROI

Birst has significantly enhanced visualization capabilities, making it a standout choice for demonstrations. Companies gain substantial ROI by reselling subscriptions and offering professional services to clients. Birst's impact extends beyond visualization, giving sales teams a robust new tool and enabling support staff to access previously unavailable data. Its influence permeates company operations, showcasing its broad utility and effectiveness.

Pricing

Enterprise buyers find Birst's subscription-based pricing negotiable, with pricing influenced by data types via connector license costs. While the licensing model presents a higher entry point in regions like Australia, it offsets infrastructure expenses. Birst is often 40% to 65% cheaper over three years compared to other tools, thanks to inclusive hosting costs. Buyers are encouraged to negotiate and assess Birst's extensive capabilities before committing, ensuring the product meets urgent feature requirements.
  • "Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."

Service and Support

Birst's customer service receives praise for having dedicated Customer Success Managers who are highly responsive, fostering strong user relationships. Technical support is generally rated positively, with quick response times and helpful guidance, though feedback varies, with ratings ranging from 3/10 to 10/10. Some users highlight excellent support, while others note an average experience. Users value high-quality service and the technical expertise of tier one support, with issues occasionally arising due to time zone synchronization.

Deployment

Birst's initial setup is generally straightforward due to its cloud-based nature, requiring no server installation. While day-to-day users find it easy, administrators may face complexities in areas such as data model configuration and transformation syntax. Third-party implementers can help streamline the process. Some experienced complexity with professional services and customization needs. Time to market and analytics development are rapid, though advanced features can introduce challenges.

Scalability

Birst's scalability is a mixed experience. Some find it robust and easily scalable, highlighting its core features as advantageous. Others face challenges with data processing time, extraction, and incrementing data load. Minor issues occur with data connectivity and rendering, needing optimization. While some manage without encountering difficulties, others see potential slowdowns with larger datasets. Successfully scaling is possible with additional cost or adherence to guidelines. Birst stands out for offering control and security, despite some limitations.

Stability

Many users report no stability issues with Birst, though some experience problems during upgrades or with large datasets. Instances of slow dashboard load times and backend errors are notable concerns for some. While some migrations lead to errors, others observe improvement and effectiveness in handling large daily data influxes. Certain environments face scaling challenges, yet others achieve satisfactory performance.
These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.
Download our Birst Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

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Learn more about Birst

A unified semantic layer maintains common definitions and key metrics.
Birst’s two-tier architecture aligns back-end sources with line-of-business or local data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source into a unified semantic layer. Users are enabled with self-service analytics through executive dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.

Birst goes to market in two primary ways: as a direct sale, for enterprises using Birst on internal data to manage their business; and embedded, for companies who offer analytic products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products.

Birst’s is packaged in 3 available formats: Platform and per-user fee; by Department or Business Unit; by end-customer (for embedded scenarios).

Birst customers

Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore

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Product Categories

Product Categories
Reporting
Embedded BI

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Birst reviews

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SK
Principal Engineering Manager I at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Verified user of Birst
Sep 12, 2017
Product version discussed: 5.22
Offers dashboards and self-service reports. The report performance is very slow.

Pros

"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."

Cons

"Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution."

What is most valuable?

Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain.

How has it helped my organization?

Most of our customers are interested in dashboards and self-service reports. We are able to offer them these features with this solution.

*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Read full review (300 words)
PeerSpot user
Director BI Services at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
Verified user of Birst
May 9, 2017
Product version discussed: 5.26.4
Provides ETL, connectivity, report, and dashboard tools.

What is most valuable?

  • Cloud based: One platform with all the ETL, connectivity, report and dashboard tools in one product. This allows for faster development and no integration problems.
  • Network BI: (The ability to share data marts/stores/ERP/CRM/RDBMS data, etc.) This is a unique feature for data virtualization in the cloud. It enables Enterprise BI in the cloud.
  • The ability to deploy DWHs at lightning speed. This affords 60% faster development than traditional BI projects.
  • Supports mobile connectivity and interaction. All the information, anytime and anywhere on your desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
  • It is a step towards self-service-BI because of the user-friendly interface.

This is the best cloud based BI platform/solution out there.

How has it helped my organization?

We are a vendor/partner, so we have been able to create a valuable business model for migrating our customers from legacy systems to this cloud BI platform. Internally, we are gradually introducing this product enterprise-wide to support various operational divisions. As a partner we host our own Appliances for the SMB market in the Benelux area.

*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're partners in the Benelux, but also using Birst internally.
Read full review (606 words)
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Birst
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Find out what your peers are saying about Birst. Updated June 2025
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PeerSpot user
Manager Data Services at a logistics company with 201-500 employees
Verified user of Birst
May 8, 2017
Product version discussed: 5.25
The creation of the meta-data layer has been well though out.

What is most valuable?

ETL process is excellent as well as the admin tools to set it up. Creation of the meta-data layer has been well thought out by the Birst design team. Working with the front-end Dashboard, KPI and Dashlet tools is a snap. Easy to learn and use. The Mobile version is coming on strong in 2017. Just reviewed the product with the Product Manager and it's the way forward for being used on the go.

How has it helped my organization?

Prior to using Birst, Apex did not have BI readily available to the customers. Now we have three tool sets, each matching one of our product lines. The customers are able to see patterns and trends never before available. It opens up their eyes to changing their business to increase profitability.

*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Read full review (743 words)
PeerSpot user
Senior Software Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Verified user of Birst
May 8, 2017
Product version discussed: 5.25
The admin module helps standardize data.

What is most valuable?

Birst admin is a great module which helps standardize data to a gold standard. We are able to integrate very quickly and get new data elements into the model.

How has it helped my organization?

Our organization is helping a cancer hospital bring insight from their data. We work on highly regulated PHI data.

*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Read full review (350 words)
RH
Product Manager at a tech vendor
Verified user of Birst
May 8, 2017
The dashboards and Visualizer are valuable.

What is most valuable?

The dashboards and Visualizer are the most valuable features.

How has it helped my organization?

Birst has made it easier for us to provide embedded data visualization tools to our customers.

*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Read full review (435 words)
PeerSpot user
Sr. Business Intelligence Consultant at Avantas, LLC
Verified user of Birst
Apr 6, 2017
Product version discussed: 5.24
We deploy dashboards using the integrated data warehousing and visualization abilities. Setup is complex.

What is most valuable?

1) Connection to external sources : Birst uses several connection methods to take data in from your data sources and stages it into its own “Data Mart” if you will.

2) Staging and Warehousing: This stages data from several sources makes Birst a fairly robust data warehouse solution. A lot of vendors can do that well and so does Birst.

3) Modeling: Birst utilizes a start schema for dimensional modeling of the data that is staged.

4) Visualization: In most vendors Data warehousing and then data modeling were two separate functionalities. The idea was to be able to sell visualization tools as a separate suite to users who already had an in-house warehouse.

However, recently, several vendors have started combining the warehousing and visualization abilities into one stop shop. For example, for a long time, Tableau was and probably is the leading provider of visualizer tools but warehousing data through tableau is much more cumbersome and resource intensive. Birst, Qlikview etc. have not been able to provide the exact beautification and features in the visualizer for self-service dashboards as Tableau but they have managed to seamlessly allow data visualization and dashboard development from the warehouse on the go.

This goes into the technical inter-operability of the warehouse with visualization, data understandability, query performance and render time.


How has it helped my organization?

The objective of using Birst-mediated dashboards is to deliver interactive and online information to our clients in a client-specific and data-distributed format. We are yet to realize the real return on the investment given the need to alter the underlying intention of the product’s use.

*Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Read full review (940 words)
PeerSpot user
Business Intelligence Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Verified user of Birst
    Mar 23, 2017
    I like the single suite module from ETL for reporting and dashboards.

    What is most valuable?

    • Built-in application connectors for most common purposes: ERP/CRM AWS and REST API.
    • Single suite module from ETL for reporting and dashboards
    • Cloud based BI that can be accessed from anywhere, anytime from mobiles, iPods, tablets, and PCs.

    How has it helped my organization?

    I built dashboards for the sales and marketing department which helped them do forecasting.

    *Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We're the only resellers in our area. Our company is the sole reseller of Birst.
    Read full review (311 words)
    PeerSpot user
    Sr. Manager of Enterprise Applications with 501-1,000 employees
    Verified user of Birst
    Mar 6, 2017
    Product version discussed: 5
    Provides analytic consolidation. The ETL needs a graphical processing interface.

    What is most valuable?

    I found the ETL process very valuable to us.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It has provided new levels of analytic consolidation.

    *Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    Read full review (379 words)