Sisense For Cloud Data Teams vs Infor Birst

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is a powerful BI tool that excels in the hands of data analysts with coding knowledge. These analysts will be able to model, manage, prepare, manipulate and analyze data with ease. As the platform supports SQL, Python and R programming languages, the sky's the limit when it comes to extensibility, development and coding support. The platform allows for strong collaboration within an organization, designed to alleviate the time-consuming burden of reporting and data visualization on IT teams while allowing business users to access insights on their own time. Most of the features are built around making the analytics team’s job easier, with reusable code, built-in collaboration and more. The support team earned universal praise from users who contacted them, citing their swift, in-depth and informative answers as immensely helpful in resolving any issues they had with the solution. In addition to hands-on support, a speedy implementation process ensures that customers can get the platform up and running in no time. We found that users’ opinions of the platform’s functionality and ease of use differed significantly based on their own roles; analysts generally praised its robust data visualization and data querying features, while decision-makers often found it hard to use, due to the SQL language barrier. SQL is necessary for most functions, and even though there is a visual query editor that attempts to make SQL more accessible, some users said that the platform doesn’t do enough in this regard. Overall, users did agree that the tool makes it easy to collaborate with each other to bridge that gap, with most of the analytics being done on the technical end, letting business users simply access those results. Still, it’s difficult to accurately call Sisense for Cloud Data Teams a self-service analytics tool, as it requires an IT or analyst team’s involvement to truly shine. Additionally, the cost can be prohibitive to smaller businesses. Overall, Sisense for Cloud Data Teams can be extremely powerful in the right hands - for those who know SQL and how to use it, it’s a dream for querying data and delivering analytics, but for those who don’t have the necessary IT resources, it could prove difficult to fully maximize the value of this data solution.

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.