Birst vs Board comparison

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Infor Logo
202 views|146 comparisons
76% willing to recommend
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595 views|405 comparisons
94% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Birst and Board based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting.
To learn more, read our detailed Reporting Report (Updated: April 2024).
770,141 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: Seeking advise on going with Birst, BOARD or Pentaho as an OEM platform solution where we could end up with 1,000's of users over time.
Answer: Bruce, have you made a decision about which solution is the best fit for your needs? I would love to hear your feedback.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Dashboards and self-service reports. These are widely used by customers in the EPM domain."

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"Primary valuable features are its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently.""With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support.""The aesthetics of it are really nice. That is what attracted us to BOARD: the ease and functionality of it.""All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online.""Now, we have only one version of the truth.""My favourite feature of BOARD is the ability to write back to the OLAP DB, as well as the Rdb, and secure user data allowing databases to be flushed and rebuilt daily.""It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well.""The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."

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

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"The one thing that I think we would like to see in terms of improvement of the application is the ability to print. It's fantastic to have all of these graphic visualization of data, but we're not able to very easily just print... From my perspective, if you can have a little "print" button and then you just click it and it would produce what's on the screen, that would be very helpful.""It would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website.""Sometimes, the data disappears from the product.""We can't delete entities and cubes in Boards because it interrupts our whole data model.""It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive.""It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources. BOARD is a great tool to become the single source of the truth. Making it easier to connect data sources for niche software tools will make it easier to keep everything in one place.""​One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes.​""Some of our users are still using an MS Office add-in for Excel for certain calculations, and when they export from Board, some of the values, some of the totals and column names, are not coming through into Excel."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Please negotiate on the price and purchase the latest version."
  • More Birst Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."
  • "​In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."
  • "It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."
  • "The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."
  • More Board Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Anonymous User
    it_user375219 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user375219 (Consultant at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees)
    Real User

    I would recommend you to for Pentaho as it is open source and I think for 1000 users Pentaho is descent and cost effective.

    it_user74796 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user74796 (CEO)
    Vendor

    Hello,
    You can look at our BI & Data Analytics Platform 'pi'. We have replaced the BI Platforms mentioned above at few of our customer locations and will be glad to have a demo arranged for our BI Tool.
    We are a company based out of India.

    Regards,
    Rahul
    www.progenbusiness.com
    +91-98663 97166

    it_user209304 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user209304 (Responsable Datawarehouse at a comms service provider)
    Vendor

    I'm not famialiar with these BI Tools, but I could advise you to use
    SISENSE BI Tools.
    It's really easy to use and for Non IT they could adopt it easily.

    It can handle big data with a best performance and with their concept of
    chipset technology to fetch data you can really the difference.

    And for IT Team, it gives the end user the independance in term of
    experience.

    it_user172275 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user172275 (Consultant at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees)
    Consultant

    Hi,
    I'm working with pentaho tools from 5 year and I've built small and big projects with it. Pentaho is a complete platform, because you can:
    - build ETL
    - build OLAP cube
    - create flat report
    - create OLAP analisys report with drag&drop
    - manage user access with different role
    - schedule and send report to managers
    - and other
    I projected, built and maintained OLAP projects for telecomunication companies (Telecomitalia Spa), automotive companies (Tomasi auto) and food retail companies (Frescomercato), and I can guaranty that all works fine.

    it_user196212 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user196212 (Vice President - Product Information with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    Key to our situation are a number of elements that I did not go into since I was asking for specific feedback on three specific options. A couple of those were found to be more difficult which eliminated a number of suppliers including the ones suggested in reply to my original inquiry. Fuzzy matching between many different retailers transaction data and our control data set where there will be significant dirty data. Advanced filters to group data around business rules, such as +/- around different numeric values for comparisons within the group of similar transactions. Any specific feedback on Birst, Board, Pentaho?

    it_user244644 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user244644 (Works with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Real User

    Hi,

    To be honest, I can't see why you are not looking at Jaspersoft?

    In the words of Gartner... Jaspersoft is widely used by ISVs and end-user organizations to embed content in analytic applications and products. The embedded BI critical capability is another example where the collective strengths of the individual products result in a solid score for Tibco overall. It assesses both the ability of the platform to embed content through APIs, SDKs and open standards, and also its ability to consume PMML- and R-based models.

    Both of TIBCO's core BI products are used in OEM/embedded use cases, so don't discount Spotfire of course, but if you are looking at embedded production reporting then I would suggest Jaspersoft.

    it_user186843 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user186843 (Editor/Writer with 201-500 employees)
    Vendor

    Hi, I can't really help you decide between the options you've asked about since I only really have any hands-on experience with one of the tools that you've mentioned - but I can offer some advice, based on our own experience with OEM clients at Sisense (see, for example, here: www.sisense.com ).

    From your question it's clear that there are two main issues you are concerned with: scalability and ease of deployment.

    In terms of scalability, the first thing you should be worried about is PERFORMANCE. Will the tool continue to work at the same speed and stability when it's running not tens, but tens of thousands of concurrent queries? Which type of hardware infrastructure will this require? Will this force me to limit the size or granularity of the data that my end users see?

    Of course any BI salesperson will tend to answer these questions with an enthusiastic "YES", but check to see that they have some support for their claims. Get your R&D \ IT department on the line and try to understand the technology behind each of the products and whether it is indeed built for the heavy lifting you will need it to do.

    Ask for a real proof of concept, on your own data and according to the approximate "strain" 1000s of concurrent users would put on the system. If your vendor says this can't be done in a reasonable time-frame - run for the hills. At Sisense we're usually the ones who insist on having a full POC on the prospect's own data before signing a deal - to align expectations, prove our product's capabilities, etc.

    In terms of DEPLOYMENT - I would recommend against relying strictly on consultants or your vendor's professional services. This is your own product: your own developers HAVE to know all the ins and outs. Relying too heavily on external developers is dicey - what happens when you want to give your app a complete overhaul in the next release, but only the consultant \ vendor really knows the code or data model that they have implemented? In this case you will be, so to speak, "at their mercy".

    So I would recommend actually minimizing reliance on consultants and the vendor's developers, and instead opting to choose a product that can easily be white-labeled, customized and modified. At Sisense we have ensured this can be done using standard APIs such as REST and Javascript; and additionally included built-in features that allow you to set up data security, SSL, etc., without needing to write any code of your own.

    Again, this is something you should ask the vendor to PROVE as part of a proof of concept, rather than take their word for it, but in the bottom line - I would strongly recommend retaining your developers' independence, rather than going down the consultant \ professional services road.

    And if your shortlist isn't sealed shut yet, I'd take a look at the Sisense OEM program: www.sisense.com

    Best,

    Eran

    it_user254049 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user254049 (Executive - IT with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Vendor

    Why not go for Tableau for quick easy implementation with robust reporting
    & BI functionalities.

    Questions from the Community
    Ask a question

    Earn 20 points

    Top Answer:We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and… more »
    Top Answer:All the reports are prepared automatically.
    Top Answer:Sometimes, the data disappears from the product. We have had a few such cases. When I added my comments to the data, it disappeared. A technical specialist tried to restore it. It was not convenient… more »
    Ranking
    32nd
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    202
    Comparisons
    146
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    19th
    out of 50 in Reporting
    Views
    595
    Comparisons
    405
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    470
    Rating
    7.3
    Comparisons
    Microsoft Power BI logo
    Compared 36% of the time.
    ThoughtSpot logo
    Compared 33% of the time.
    Alteryx logo
    Compared 31% of the time.
    Anaplan logo
    Compared 28% of the time.
    SAP Analytics Cloud logo
    Compared 16% of the time.
    IBM Planning Analytics logo
    Compared 9% of the time.
    Oracle Hyperion logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Microsoft Power BI logo
    Compared 7% of the time.
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    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).

    BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

    BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

    Sample Customers
    Citrix Systems, Jive Software, SunnyD, Toshiba Medical Systems, Cisco OpenDNS, RB, Sunny D, Vertafore
    Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company25%
    Retailer17%
    Insurance Company8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Government20%
    Healthcare Company20%
    Hospitality Company10%
    Pharma/Biotech Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Wholesaler/Distributor7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise33%
    Large Enterprise52%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise40%
    Large Enterprise23%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise62%
    Buyer's Guide
    Reporting
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting. Updated: April 2024.
    770,141 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Birst is ranked 32nd in Reporting while Board is ranked 19th in Reporting with 35 reviews. Birst is rated 7.4, while Board is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Birst writes "The dashboards and Visualizer are valuable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Board writes "A stable solution with good user-experience, easy deployment but needs some improvement with engine ". Birst is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, ThoughtSpot and Alteryx, whereas Board is most compared with Anaplan, SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics, Oracle Hyperion and Microsoft Power BI.

    See our list of best Reporting vendors.

    We monitor all Reporting reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.