Birst vs Looker

Birst is an analytics platform that combines data from multiple sources and presents reports and dashboards in a browser or native mobile app. It offers interactive dashboards, self-service notifications, visual data discovery, and pixel-perfect operational reporting. Automated data refinement and ETL merge and model information from different platforms into a user data store. Its Networked BI approach combines centralized and decentralized analytics with reusable governed business definitions, blended models, and self-service analytic sandboxes. Infor describes prebuilt industry content across more than 11 industries, with role-specific material and out-of-the-box data models. Birst Enterprise includes AI/ML integrations, Smart Insights for automatically creating personalized dashboards, and 1TB of storage. Deployment options include hosted multi-tenant cloud, an on-premises virtual appliance, and embedding; mobile analytics work on iOS and Android, with offline access included in Enterprise. Listed functions also include real-time refresh, row-level security, scheduled reports, natural-language queries, planning, budgeting, rolling forecasts, scenario modeling, management reporting, and financial consolidation. Pricing is on request, and no free plan is listed.

Looker helps organizations explore, share, and visualize company data for business decisions. Its LookML semantic models define dimensions, aggregates, calculations, and relationships, then use those definitions to generate SQL queries. Gemini-powered natural-language analytics lets users ask questions, while Dashboard Agents provide summaries and explorations grounded in governed metrics. Looker connects to BigQuery, Spanner, Cloud SQL for MySQL, Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, and other Google services. The Looker Marketplace offers applications, prebuilt LookML models, visualizations, and actions for delivering data to third-party services. Listed capabilities include hourly refresh, row-level security, scheduled reports, and embedded analytics. Deployment is hybrid, with web, Android, iOS, API, and self-hosted options. Mobile apps let users view Looks and dashboards. Google documents TLS 1.2 or later for data in transit and AES-256 encryption for locally stored sensitive application data. A free 14-day trial is advertised, but there is no free plan. Standard, Enterprise, and Embed each list one production instance, 10 Standard Users, and two Developer Users; their API call allowances differ. Pricing is on request.