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Recently we have been struggling with finding alternative to our current reporting service - BIRT, developed by Eclipse.

We did some research, but each time we seem to be unable to fully comprehend capabilities of different solutions provided by numerous companies. First of all, why we chose BIRT:

  • easy learning curve,
  • rather stable,
  • digests long, complex queries,
  • quite fine formatting of numbers, charts,
  • forgives mistakes in development stage,
  • allows quite complex solutions,
  • easy to manage user roles and access

Why we don't want BIRT anymore? - it refreshes basically on-click, - UI does not allow to work on generated report, i.e. - if you want to see chart for each country, you have to either generate report for each country or insert chart for each country within report design

Can you please share solutions you used during your career, their pros and cons? We need reliable reporting service for growing company, that would easily handle queries that take up to several minutes, with parameters and visualised data.

Currently we are trying out Grafana, but unfortunately it doesn't come even close to our requirements.

Marcin
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4 Answers4

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I did some research on Reporting Alternatives a few months ago, I find out the following (not sorted in any order):

Jasper Reports JasperSoft Community

Pros

  • Free and open source
  • Multiplatform
  • Wide range of features
  • Different modes embedding, server, etc.

Cons

  • Migration between versions
  • Reliability when integrated into applications

SQL SERVER REPORTING SERVICES Reporting Services

Pros

  • Realiable
  • Nice set of features
  • Can generate desktop and web reports
  • Works on premises
  • Free (on Express edition) comes bundled with SQL Server Pro and up

Cons

  • SQL Server only
  • Windows Only

Power BI Power Bi

I would recommend to explore this alternative if it posible. In my opinion the results it produces are way better than the others.

Pros

  • Intuitive and easy to use
  • Can create complex and interactive reports
  • Can create advanced dashboards with ease
  • Ever growing set of features and OLAP analysis
  • Can integrate well with Machine Learning and other Azure services

Cons

  • Cloud based
  • Monthy fee depending on the amount of data

Pentaho Pentaho Community

Pros

  • Free and open source
  • BI focused
  • Advanced set of features

Cons

  • Steep learning curve

Disclaimer: This features list are based on my own experience and researh I encourage you to check the alternatives out to find out the best that suits your needs. Hope it helps.

Carlos487
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  • Thank you for your input! Would you share which one you have decided to use and why? I of course found all the solutions you have mentioned, but it takes a lot of time to get hand-on experience with each of them and become able to tell key features and differences that could rule out certain software. – Marcin Apr 27 '18 at 07:29
  • I have personally used Reporting Services because my apps were build with dotnet and they worked with the free Express database, excelent integration between them. Also, at my current job they use Jasper because all their stack is Java based, and runs on Linux servers, it is free and multiplatform. Also I have decided for custom interactive html5/js dashboards with XLSX data export for Node apps.Which stack are you using right now? – Carlos487 Apr 28 '18 at 17:23
  • To be honest, I have no idea. Our basic setup is simply MySQL database + reporting tool - and we are looking for some replacement reporting service that would allow us to fetch data from it using complex queries, as we still have not developed any data warehouse. Rather than on technology, we are focused on certain requirements that have to be met to allow us to continue on developing reporting tools. BIRT is quite sufficient, but does not allow end users to work on fetched data in dashboards - i.e. they can not dynamically filter it to certain group, they have to reload entire report. – Marcin May 02 '18 at 13:54
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    @Marcin Ok now I understand in that case I would recommend Power BI, but it is a cloud service and you might have to host your MySQL database in Azure. Otherwise, I would use a mix architecture by creating a web app to display some dynamic data with html5 and providing links to download the less used reports using BIRT or Jasper. – Carlos487 May 03 '18 at 14:15
  • Yeah, we certainly need to check out Power BI, hosting anything in cloud is an issue though. Another restriction is to minimise impact on our IT resources while introducing new tool, we do not want to build reporting service almost from scratch. – Marcin May 04 '18 at 12:36
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I actually can really recommend http://www.metabase.com. Comes packed into Docker if you want, you can demo it within minutes.

Kaylon
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You should try out Helical Insight.

  • Open Source, browser based
  • Support both pixel perfect canned reports as well as adhoc reports
  • It is developer friendly with placeholders to insert JS and CSS
  • Works with almost any database with JDBC drivers
  • Has an in-built workflow engine
  • Has over 400+ APIs You can download it at www.helicalinsight.com
Pooja
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In case if someone was wondering - we've stick with Microsoft PowerBI. It still has some cons, like pricing or having hard time with parametrized queries, but overall is rather easy tool to create nice visualizations of data, especially if you're planning to use OLAP cubes (as we did).

Marcin
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