Infor Birst vs Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services

Last Updated:

Our analysts compared Infor Birst vs Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Infor Birst Software Tool
Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services Software Tool

Product Basics

Infor Birst is a cloud-based analytics software tool that aims to help users discover insights without the need for analyst input. It unifies IT-managed enterprise data with user-owned data, supporting the blending of both in a top-down and bottom-up manner. It uses consistent business metrics to structure raw data into organized sets and visualizations. It helps users identify patterns and better understand their organization’s KPIs.

It offers a seamless, integrated UI that allows users to perform every step of the data analysis process in a single interface, enabling a smooth experience. It can be deployed either from the cloud or self-hosted on-premise.

Users can purchase it in three available formats: per-user fee, by department or business unit or by end-customer in embedded scenarios.

To explore other popular solutions that Infor offers, visit our Infor company page.
read more...
Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS) helps organizations transform raw data into actionable insights through a suite of cloud-based tools. It allows users to gather, store, analyze, and visualize data to make data-driven decisions. BICS is ideal for businesses of all sizes seeking comprehensive BI solutions without the need for extensive on-premises infrastructure. Key benefits include centralized data access, self-service analytics, and pre-built dashboards for quick insights. Popular features include interactive dashboards, data exploration tools, and mobile access for on-the-go analysis. User reviews highlight BICS' scalability, ease of use, and powerful data analysis capabilities. Pricing varies based on deployment options and features selected. Subscription models offer flexible payment options and scalability. Compared to similar products, BICS offers competitive pricing and a comprehensive set of features, making it a strong choice for businesses seeking a robust and cost-effective BI solution.

Pros
  • Scalable
  • Easy to use
  • Powerful data analysis
  • Mobile access
  • Competitive pricing
Cons
  • Limited customization
  • Steep learning curve for advanced features
  • Limited data connectors
  • Potential vendor lock-in
  • Limited customer support
read more...
$2,500 Monthly, Quote-based
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
$0/User, Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Amex
Citrix
DVF
Pilot Flying J
Sunny D
we're gathering data

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Scalability on Demand: Prevents data bottlenecks caused by data loads that exceed capacity as business grows by scaling as needed through a multi-tenant architecture across a multi-node environment.
  • Faster Results: Delivers faster analytics across the entire organization by utilizing automated data analysis technology, cloud architecture and reusable metadata.
  • Data Clarity: Promote data clarity and reduce ambiguity by offering unique views into data to help everyone, regardless of technical expertise. Better understand the meaning of individual KPIs via the semantic layer, a set of shared business definitions.
  • Self-Service: Gives employees at all levels of technical skill self-service tools, such as drag-and-drop, to explore, analyze and visualize data through the user-oriented UX.
  • Informed Decisions: Make more data-driven business decisions by better understanding operations. Identify trends in business data by collecting, organizing, exploring and visualizing data.
  • Predict Future Outcomes: Generate actionable insights by leveraging AI to analyze historical data and improve business moving forward.
  • Intuitive Visualizations: Easily interpret trends by cleaning data and building understandable visualizations through machine learning.
  • Networked BI: Builds collective intelligence. Combines IT-managed enterprise data with user-generated data and eliminates data silos, unifying data from every part of an organization.
  • Certified Security: Secures data at every degree of detail, down to the row and column level. Employs strict data security protocols and procedures to protect data in  processes and data centers, which are certified for ISO27001 and SOC II, TYPE II standards and compliant with EU Safe Harbor laws.
  • Free Trial: Try it hands-on via a free trial.
read more...
  • Business Insights: Offers users the ability to get a deeper understanding of what is happening in their business on a day-to-day basis as well as from a broad overview perspective.
  • Strategic Predictions: Using historical data, users can make more accurate predictions and forecasts of future business results.
  • Smart Visualizations: Users can create stunning graphics with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and easily adjust layouts. The solution offers users the optimal visualization for the type of data selected, but users can also change the visualization type to view data from multiple angles.
  • Interconnected Interface: Data and visualizations are tied together. Therefore, highlighting data within a certain visual automatically highlights correlating data in other visuals, easily revealing patterns and trends that may not have been obvious.
  • Ease of Use: Simple, clean UI offers easy navigation through the homepage, answers page and dashboards. Nesting and borders in the interface help users stay focused on the data instead of distracting elements of the application.
read more...
  • Automated Data Refinement: Automatically merge data from different sources into one user-ready data storage and optimize it for analysis. 
  • Semantic Layer: Boosts trustworthiness of data and reduces data anarchy by adding an agile semantic layer between the user and data. Work with data privately while staying connected to the network via a virtual tenant space.">
  • Real-time Access: Directly query on-premise data sources in real-time, eliminating the need to first extract and then upload data to the cloud.
  • Adaptive UX: Create reports and dashboards without coding knowledge via intuitive drag-and-drop tools. Supports different analytic styles, such as visual discovery, and mobile, and third-party tools such as Excel, R and Tableau. 
  • Reusable Rules: Automatically generates a common architecture based on a reusable set of business definitions without manual intervention.
  • Interactive Dashboards: Explore data even further via interactive dashboards that have drill-down capabilities such as lasso filters.
  • Multi-Tenant Cloud Architecture: Scales vertically and horizontally with a multi-tenant architecture built on a multi-node environment. Speeds insight generation by reducing the overall time spent on repetitive on-premise tasks. 
  • One-Click Data Connectivity: Access existing data with one click via its extensive library of pre-built connectors.
  • Embedded Analytics: Scale with clients’ businesses via flexible deployment options including embedding, APIs and localization capabilities.
  • Machine Learning: Recognizes patterns in data via Smart Analytics and automatically builds visualizations based on predictive analytics. Learns over time, and remembers previous search queries, past visualizations and more.
  • Deployment Options: Deploy as a SaaS through the cloud or go hybrid, keeping data in-house but running analytics through cloud-based servers. Or, deploy through a virtual appliance that delivers all the benefits of a traditional cloud-hosted SaaS while being locally hosted on-premise or in a private-cloud.
  • Mobile App: Access reports and dashboards via its native mobile application for iOS and Android.
read more...
  • Visual Analytics: Creates graphical visualizations of data to make analyzing insights faster, easier and more accessible.
  • Connected Interface: Data and all visualizations are all tied together, and changes or highlighting in one will be mirrored in the others. This dynamic experience lets visualizations function as connected filters and guiding users through their exploration.
  • Data Blending: Infers correlations between data sets to easily mash personal with managed data. Extends dimensions to add facts or improve the timeliness and relevance of analysis.
  • Mobile Application: Provides an agile mobile experience spanning users’ data portfolio that offers a consistent interface with the desktop application. Users can access analytics instantly on any device.
  • Range of Report Types: The system offers a variety of report types including ad-hoc queries and analysis, enterprise reporting, dashboards, mobile analytics, multidimensional OLAP, scorecards and predictive analytics.
  • BI Server: In-memory optimizations provide quick rollups, powerful compression, faster rollups and sophisticated memory usage for a range of data sizes.
read more...

Product Ranking

#22

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#396

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

Find out who the leaders are

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 560 reviews
we're gathering data
82%
of users recommend this product

Infor Birst has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 560 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

we're gathering data
4.3 (7)
n/a
3.9 (92)
n/a
4.08 (49)
n/a
4.1 (50)
n/a
4.1 (176)
n/a
4.2 (186)
n/a

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Integration: About 80% of users who mentioned its data integration capabilities said that the platform, powered by built-in connectivity tools, connected well to many types of data sources.
Data Visualization: Approximately 81% of users who reviewed visualization said that the tool provided attractive and intuitive data presentation options for at-a-glance data analysis and trend charting.
Ease of Use: The platform was user-friendly and intuitive, according to around 77% of users who reviewed the interface.
Functionality: Approximately 68% of users who reviewed functionality said that the platform provided strong capabilities to streamline preparation and consumption of data for developers and end users alike.
Data Management: Automated data warehouse creation made data modeling a breeze, around 65% of users who reviewed the platform’s data management system said.
Setup: Around 69% of users who mentioned implementation said that the solution being cloud-based, coupled with excellent onboarding support from the vendor, made deployment easy.
Show more
Scalability: Easily scales to accommodate growing data volumes and user needs.
Ease of Use: User-friendly interface and intuitive features for both technical and non-technical users.
Self-Service Analytics: Empowers users across departments to explore data and generate insights without relying on IT.
Data Integration: Integrates data from various sources into a single platform for a unified view of business performance.
Powerful Data Analysis: Advanced data exploration and analysis tools for uncovering hidden trends and patterns.
Mobile Access: Access data and insights from anywhere, anytime on mobile devices.
Cost-Effectiveness: Competitive pricing and flexible subscription options make it accessible for businesses of all sizes.
Show more
Performance: Approximately 87% of users who reviewed the platform’s performance said that it was slow and inconsistent in data processing and data refresh.
Learning Curve: About 81% of users who mentioned the learning curve said that documentation was often insufficient and incorrect, and that the platform’s use of proprietary language made the learning curve quite steep.
Service and Support: About 46% of users who reviewed this feature said that support was poor and turnaround times were painfully long, extending up to several months.
Show more
Limited Customization: Pre-built dashboards and reports offer limited flexibility for advanced users.
Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Features: Mastering advanced features requires significant training and technical expertise.
Limited Data Connectors: May not support all specific data sources required by some businesses.
Potential Vendor Lock-in: Migrating data and insights to another platform can be complex and time-consuming.
Limited Customer Support: Some users report challenges in accessing timely and comprehensive customer support.
Show more

Infor Birst is an integrated cloud-based end-to-end solution for sourcing raw data, and extracting, warehousing and reporting for enterprise data analysis. With built-in tools for data integration and strong embedded analytics capabilities, users leverage its data visualization capabilities to create and share metric-specific dashboards and reports. Users who reviewed data management said that automated data warehouse creation was a strong feature of the platform, as well as its user-friendly interface. Many users who reviewed its functionality said that, equipped with a powerful ETL and efficient ODBC drivers for integration, the platform was flexible and scalable with a multitude of features for data discovery and analysis. Around 69% of users who reviewed ease of implementation said that deployment was easy with the integrated cloud platform, though some users said that the setup processes were unclear and they required in-house IT support for onboarding. On the flip side, users who mentioned performance said that the speed of data processing and data refresh was slow and this impacted report generation capabilities. Documentation was inconsistent and often incorrect, and the use of proprietary query language made the learning curve quite steep, many users who reviewed this feature said. Support turnaround times were woefully long, even extending up to several months as reported by a number of users. Some users who reviewed functionality said that the code was buggy and the platform stalled often when processing data for ad-hoc reporting. Many users complained that these bugs were not addressed for years, and new releases often impacted pre-existing features. Possibly because of its performance issues with large amounts of data, quite a few users rate it as a good BI tool for small and midsize companies that require less complex data analysis, rather than larger enterprises. In summary, Infor Birst is a BI ecosystem with a networked approach to data visualization and predictive analytics that eliminates data silos and serves as a single source of truth for enterprise data.

Show more

User reviews of Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Services (BICS) paint a picture of a powerful and easy-to-use BI platform with some limitations. Users praise its scalability, self-service analytics, and data integration capabilities, which empower them to make data-driven decisions without relying heavily on IT. As one user stated, "BICS has transformed how we analyze data. Now everyone from sales to finance can access insights and make informed decisions, which has significantly improved our efficiency and performance." However, some users find the platform to be less customizable than competitors like Tableau and Power BI, with limited options for building custom dashboards and reports. Additionally, the learning curve for advanced features can be steep, and some users report limited support for specific data sources. One user commented, "While BICS is great for basic reporting, it lacks the flexibility and advanced features I need for complex analysis. I find myself often switching to other tools for more in-depth work." Despite these limitations, users generally agree that BICS offers a compelling value proposition for businesses seeking a comprehensive and cost-effective BI solution. Its strengths in scalability, ease of use, and data integration set it apart from competitors, making it a good choice for organizations of all sizes. As one user summarized, "BICS may not be the most customizable BI platform out there, but its ease of use, data integration capabilities, and competitive pricing make it a great choice for our company. It helps us get the insights we need to make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition." Ultimately, whether BICS is the right BI platform for your organization depends on your specific needs and priorities. If you are looking for a user-friendly and scalable solution with strong data integration capabilities, BICS is definitely worth considering. However, if you require a highly customizable platform for advanced analysis or have specific data source requirements, other options might be better suited for your needs.

Show more

Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Business Intelligence Tools


Cognos Analytics

Domo

GoodData

Grow

Logi Symphony

Looker Studio

MicroStrategy

Oracle Analytics Cloud

Power BI

Qlik Sense

QuickSight

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAS Visual Analytics

Sisense

Spotfire

Tableau

Related Categories

Head-to-Head Comparison

WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...

Compare products
Comparison Report
Just drag this link to the bookmark bar.
?
Table settings