The administration module was built using flash. It is clunky and outdated. By “clunky” I mean that it sometimes becomes confused and throw an error when I’m making a change. To clear it up, I will have to log out and log back in. We knew going into our purchase that the UI for the admin was not the strongest part of Birst at the moment. Power users often depend on the web services to complete admin tasks and the web services are robust.

Birst knows they need to improve this area of their system and have been working on that. They began improving usability overall with the the front-end UI that report writers utilize and did an excellent job with that so I have good reason to expect the admin module UI refresh to be solid as well. From what I understand, the planned changes are more significant than a simple UI refresh also.

I would like to see stronger in-built permissions capabilities. Everything we need to do can be done and passed to the product using an API. It would be nice if we could define the rule set within Birst. The addition of easy-to-use predictive analysis is coming in Birst 6, which is a missing piece right now.

I would want to see some improvement in the user management module. User management should be designed to do some bulk operations from UI.

• Performance was not that great; in-memory processing would help.
• Real-time streaming.
• At the time that I looked at this product, it was in a incubation/stabilization mode. We ran into challenges with the performance. We were told that we will be able to build our star schema model and run our dashboards easily. But, when we had to do a lot of summarization, the performance was not that great.

From a visualization perspective, this tool claims to make several advances that are indeed interesting to a large proportion of the user base. However, it needs to prioritize several extremely fundamental features associated with charting, formatting and layout control.

Some basic features that Birst needs to improve are:

• Line graph between two measures (comparing one measure to another without summing them) – Basic scatter plot sums the measure up automatically.
• Spark lines need to be made available.
• Editing trend lines and gridlines in graphs – An option for customizing label location, label background under formatting chart elements such as gridlines and labels, custom label backgrounds and transparency, etc.
• An option to customize the alignment of headings in any table as left, right, center, top, middle and bottom. Also there is need to add label customization in a table that is not associated to any measure but just plain text, instead of having to change it on the dashboard as a text input, which also does not re-size in the same ratio as the other components do when the screen size is modified.
• Conditional filter – An additional option to use a filter “where variable-xyz in (a,b,c,d,)” type of statement for filtering attributes. This is helpful when the list of attributes is long and can be used instead of manually select each box.
• Conditional display of KPI – For example, if the date range is x, then display KPI A; if the date range is y, then display KPI B.
• Conditional indicators – A solution to give conditions to KPI indicators rather than to have a measure to check against a predefined number.
• Unnecessary padding spaces around graphs, KPIs, tables – An option to be able to define the space and padding.
• An option to customize a measure within a given timeline, embedded in the measure itself. There should be way to define that timeline dependent on a user-selected time in dashboard filters. Currently, there is no ability to display several measures on different time scales in the same table. For example, measure 1, 2 and 3 current, over last quarter and over last year.

• Visualization: This aspect of the product is not up to the same level as its competitors in the market. However, it should be noted that Birst provides a complete end-to-end solution, whereas all its competitors are providing solutions for the front-end visualization piece only (for example, the Tableau solution).
• Cloud performance: While this is a unique selling point and a significant advantage in the market, we experienced some issues with the performance in the cloud-based offering when hosted in the US. However, I now understand Birst has an APAC data center.

• Release management and version control are poor or not available. As a partner you have to organize your own version control and release management system.

Licensing has been shown to have some issues.

There are specific Birst connectors included in the out-of-the-box price tag, and there are several more connectors available in Birst that have their own license fee.

Thinking from a customer perspective, this is really important to know. As per my experience, the out-of-the-box price tag is the one that is used and the extra license of connectors available was sort of a ‘surprise’. However, this was explained by Birst and it is understandable that their other connectors cost extra.

My own experience just made me think that this was a hidden cost that they tried to hide, but keeping that in mind, it might only be my experience as to how this surfaced for us, because I had this image of Birst that you pay _this_ amount and get everything.

• Customer support takes lot of time to get a solution
• The report performance is very slow

• The ETL needs a graphical processing/workflow interface
• Error logging is cumbersome to work through to find issues
• Visualizations require add-ons with other products to become state-of-the-art
• We were hoping that Birst would introduce an add-on with Tableau. To date, we have not heard any more about it.

I would like to see better training. The cost-benefit was not great. We received very basic training for a high cost. They could have gone into a deeper understanding of the tool. They kept the training very basic.

For complex reports with heavy calculations, performance can be improved. I would appreciate more customization options in measure calculations.

Earlier, we were challenged during one of the previous versions (maybe Birst version 5.18). We wanted to define a new measure and build a complex calculation using the custom and existing measures. Then, there were certain restrictions in using the custom measure.

We are currently using version 5.23 and an update is due for us. Birst (currently updated to version 5.24) is very dynamic and there is another update (version 5.25) which will be released by them soon. We never tried to explore in the recent version and unsure if customization is available already.

• The query generation is inefficient and cannot be tweaked. You have to live with whatever queries are generated by the system.
• The ETL process creates enormous temp files: Disk space can be an issue with big data sets.
• Troubleshooting is problematic: The system is a black box. Once a trouble spot is identified, there is very little ability to change the issue.

I would like to see the following:

• Better reporting functionalities
• More charts
• Enriching chart formatting to include additional properties and styles
• More advanced charts (advanced waterfalls and heatmaps)
• A type of chart to be used for time analysis. For example, current vs. last year, last month, etc. Currently, this is possible by using Birst time series or custom expressions.

Since this is something that most companies use and need, it would be interesting to create a chart type dedicated to year by year comparisons. Maybe a four block chart where each one can be configured to show specific time comparisons.

Some examples: Current year vs. last year, current month vs. previous month, and YTD comparisons.

The ability to filter out massive amounts of data and load it properly on screen needs to be improved. I would need to hide the data while I put a report together because it would load too slowly.

Birst constantly rolls out new features so they are always improving. Birst has a very active forum online. People post lots of feedback in regards to existing features. At times, they need to improve.

In my case, I needed a REST API connection and an AWS connection. They released those features after a few months.

I would like to see better connection functionality. It is not very intuitive and the UI is kind of neglected.

• User interface: The screen layout is not up to the market standards
• Customer support: Not helpful at all
• Site/user administration: There is no user administration function on the front end. Most activities require a manual command.

I would like to see improvements in the administrative modules. These are about to be addressed in Version 6.

Birst needs to improve various features, namely:

• Application connectors as existing ones aren’t quite reliable.
• Resolve issues of frequent timeouts.
• Provide a friendlier UI.
• The BQL (Birst Query Language), which is used for applying filters in dashboards, conditional formatting, custom calculations, etc., needs a more constructive syntax.
• The error messages displayed need more useful information about resolving issues.
• Build an external forum/community for online help. The in-built Birst community is relevant only for simple tasks.
• Provide concepts for Dev, QA and Production environments.

Since Birst is completely cloud based, we do not have access to its servers. It is very slow at times. We can do nothing about it and we can't even restart the servers.