BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the Eclipse IDE for creating BIRT Reports, and a runtime component for generating reports that can be deployed to any Java environment. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used standalone to integrate charts into an application.

BIRT Report designs are persisted as XML and can access a number of different data sources including SQL databases, JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs, XML and Web Services.

The project is supported by an active community of users at BIRT Exchange and developers at the Eclipse.org BIRT Project page.