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What is BIRT?

Industry Specialties: Serves all industries.

It’s an open-source project on Eclipse and is an acronym for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools. It lets organizations extract and transform data for business analysis. Its Report Designer enables visual report-building within interactive dashboards. The runtime component executes the reports once ready.

Embedded into a range of business interfaces, it enables custom design layout, data access and scripting to present report output over the web. It supports charts, crosstabs, using multiple data sources within the same report, re-using queries within reports and addition of custom code.
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#7

BIRT is ranked #7 in the Enterprise Reporting Software product directory based on the latest available data collected by SelectHub. Compare the leaders with our In-Depth Report.

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BIRT Pricing

Based on our most recent analysis, BIRT pricing starts at $0 (Open-Source).

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Starting From
$0
Pricing Model
Open-Source
Free Trial
No

Training Resources

BIRT is supported with the following types of training:

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars

Support

The following support services are available for BIRT:

Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Help Desk
Knowledge Base
Tickets
Training
24/7 Live Support

BIRT Benefits and Insights

Why use BIRT?

Key differentiators & advantages of BIRT

  • Customize Easily: Customize as needed to embed dashboards and visualizations into host business systems. Directly access the code, thanks to an open-source approach. 
  • Blend Data From Multiple Sources: Incorporate information from a wide range of sources into a single source. Uncover business opportunities and potential risks by surfacing previously hidden data trends and associations. 
  • Create Reports: Uncover insights and patterns through data summaries by organizing, filtering, sorting and grouping specified data sets.  
  • Build Presentations: Prepare reports for presentation with a selection of visualization options. Make the visuals easy to understand by inserting tables, charts, explanatory text and more. 
  • Share Data Insights: Email reports directly to other people or embed into other systems that include business websites and platforms, the Microsoft Suite and more. 

Industry Expertise

BIRT supports a range of industries with its open-source reporting technology but is especially utilized in the tech industry.

BIRT Reviews

Average customer reviews & user sentiment summary for BIRT:

User satisfaction level icon: great

30 reviews

80%

of users would recommend this product

BIRT has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 80% when considering 30 user reviews from 1 recognized software review sites.

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Based on an aggregate of BIRT reviews taken from the sources above, the following pros & cons have been curated by a SelectHub Market Analyst.

Pros

  • Drag-and-Drop Report Design: BIRT boasts a user-friendly interface that lets you visually design reports using drag-and-drop functionality. No coding required! This streamlines report creation for business users who might not be familiar with programming languages.
  • Flexibility and Customization: BIRT empowers you to tailor reports to your specific needs. From basic tables to complex charts and graphs, BIRT offers a wide range of data visualization options. This ensures your reports effectively communicate insights to a variety of audiences.
  • Integration with Various Data Sources: BIRT seamlessly connects to diverse data sources like databases, spreadsheets, and even flat files. This eliminates the hassle of data extraction and manipulation, allowing you to focus on crafting impactful reports.
  • Scheduling and Automation: BIRT allows you to schedule reports to run automatically at specific intervals. This ensures you always have access to fresh data, saving valuable time and keeping everyone on the same page.

Cons

  • Steeper Learning Curve for Advanced Features: While BIRT excels in drag-and-drop simplicity for basic reports, users venturing into complex functionalities like data scripting or advanced data manipulation might find the learning curve steeper. This can be a hurdle for teams without in-house BIRT expertise.
  • Potential Performance Issues with Large Datasets: Some users report performance limitations with exceptionally large datasets. BIRT might not be the ideal choice if you consistently work with massive amounts of data that require real-time report generation.
  • Limited Mobile Capabilities: While BIRT reports can be accessed on mobile devices, the user experience might not be optimal for all report formats. This can be a drawback for teams that heavily rely on mobile reporting for on-the-go decision-making.

Researcher's Summary:

Reviews for BIRT paint a picture of a user-friendly report designer with a loyal following, particularly among those new to report building. Its drag-and-drop interface and pre-built templates are praised for streamlining report creation compared to coding-heavy solutions. This is a major advantage for businesses that need reports up and running quickly, without tasking developers.

BIRT shines in its ability to connect to various data sources, eliminating the need for complex data extraction steps. This is a big win for teams working with data scattered across spreadsheets, databases, and even flat files. While BIRT offers strong core functionality, some reviewers mention a steeper learning curve for advanced features. For instance, users who need to wrangle massive datasets or create highly customized data visualizations might find BIRT limiting compared to more feature-rich (and often pricier) competitors. Similarly, BIRT's mobile capabilities are seen as less robust than some competing products. This can be a dealbreaker for teams that prioritize mobile reporting for field staff or remote workers who need real-time access to reports.

In conclusion, BIRT is a solid choice for businesses seeking a cost-effective and user-friendly solution for generating basic to moderately complex reports. Its strength lies in its ease of use, data source flexibility, and affordability. However, those working with exceptionally large datasets or requiring a highly customized mobile reporting experience might be better served by exploring feature-rich alternatives.

Key Features

  • Data Explorer: Build connections to data sources and view them together with business assets and data cubes.
    • Access and blend various datatypes from a range of sources, including POJOs, JDO datastores, SQL Databases, JFire scripting objects, XML and web services. 
    • Pull in more data than before by extending the available sources with Eclipse’s Open Data Access framework. 
    • Accesses Hadoop data using Hive Query Language. Ingests data from distributed databases like Cassandra through APIs. 
    • Pulls data from LDAP, report documents and Java objects. In addition to Salesforce, it can ingest information from LinkedIn, Facebook and GitHub. 
  • Report Designer: Supports a wide range of reports, layouts and formatting, with reuse of designs and elements. Create report layouts, connect to data sources and produce XML-based report designs. 
    • Navigator: Create a new Report Design Project or a new BIRT file within a project through the navigator. View all the projects in the workspace and create multiple file types such as a design file, template file, library file or report document. 
  • Sample Report Viewer: View reports in a sample web application before publishing them online. Generate and export them in HTML, PDF, CSV formats. Print locally or on the server and rerun them when needed with new parameters. 
  • BIRT Report Engine: Query data sources and merge the query results into the report layouts created by the Report Designer. Produce the report output in a wide range of formats that include Microsoft Office, HTML, PDF, postscript and open document formats. This feature is also available in the BIRT Web Viewer. 
  • Data Visualizations: Create data visualizations with task-specific editors, builders and wizards and integrate into web systems. 
    • Charts: Choose from a vast library of pie charts, Gantt charts, pyramid charts, scattergrams and many more, with multiple subtypes, such as a bar chart with options of side-by-side, stacked and percent stacked. Create charts in 2D, 2D with depth and 3D formats. 
    • Crosstabs: Present data in two dimensions (sales or hits) with the cross-tabulation or matrix feature. 
    • Palette: Drag and drop elements from the palette into the visualization layout. Add rich text to the report, including HTML formatting integrated with dynamic data. Aggregate business metrics with more than 30 built-in SQL operators. 
  • Customization: Make report data easy to understand with support for internationalization, including bidirectional text. Easily replace static report elements — report labels, table headers and chart titles — with localized text. 
  • Lists: Present data methodically through simple data lists by grouping related data together. 

Limitations

At the time of this review, these are the limitations according to user feedback:

  •  Doesn’t have an open-source report server. 
  •  Doesn’t provide map integration. 
  •  Doesn’t provide a wide range of pre-configured data types. 

Suite Support

mail_outlineEmail: Not specified.
phonePhone: Not specified.
schoolTraining: Many third-party websites offer self-paced, online and onsite training courses for a fee.
local_offerTickets: Submit a support request by logging in to the vendor’s online support portal.
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