Open Source Business Intelligence Reporting Tool Review September 1, 2009 Contributed by Benjamin Dietz & Lily Singh

 

The main purpose of a Business Intelligence system is to provide access to information for decision makers. Reporting tools help to create, administrate and distribute reports. Reports can be classified in three categories: Standard reports containing information in table form, Cubes - online analytical processing (OLAP) reports to analyze multidimensional data and Dashboards which provide an overview over selected reports and key performance indicators (KPIs). Each of these report types are often supplemented by graphical representations of the data.

There are many different reporting solutions available in the open source market. Some of them are fully open source, while others provide additional features in a proprietary version. In this article we compare the open source versions of four solutions that are among the most popular in use today:

BIRT is a popular reporting solution hosted by the Eclipse Foundation. The software project started in 2004 when Actuate Corporation joined the Eclipse Foundation and donated the software.

Founded in 2001, Jaspersoft is also an established vendor of open source business intelligence solutions. Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Suite offers a feature set comparable to Pentaho's solution. This review analyzes the features of their open source community edition (an enterprise edition is also available).

Based in Orlando, Florida, Pentaho is one of the most recognized open source BI vendors on the market. Their flagship product, Open Source Business Intelligence Suite, includes reporting, analysis, dashboards and data mining. This comparison focuses on the reporting capabilities of the open source version which has fewer features than the enterprise edition.

Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, SQL Power Group open-sourced it's reporting tool SQL Power Wabit in 2008, which offers reporting and OLAP analysis. Unlike most other open source BI reporting tools, SQL Power Wabit comes with all existing features in its open source version.

 

Product	Supported by	Source	Version Tested
BIRT	Actuate & Eclipse Foundation	www.eclipse.org	2.5 (June 2009)
Jaspersoft BI Suite	Jaspersoft	www.jaspersoft.com	3.5 (April 2009)
Pentaho BI Suite	Pentaho	www.pentaho.com	3.0 CE (May 2009)
SQL Power Wabit	SQL Power Group	www.sqlpowersoftware.com	0.9.7 (July 2009)

 

Getting started

The software should be easy to install and to use. For the ease of installation criteria, we tested how many different files had to be downloaded and how many different programs were installed in order to create and view reports. We also determined whether sufficient examples are available, and whether prior knowledge of SQL is required to create reports.

Feature Richness

This section compares the main product features in order to determine whether the software fulfills the most common reporting requirements. The ease of use criteria indicates how much effort is needed to create and view reports. It is also important to see which data sources can be used and which output formats are available.

Available Support

An often heard prejudice against open source software is their lack of documentation and support. This category contains information on how well supported the reporting solution is based on its documentation and forum activity.

 

	BIRT	Jaspersoft BI Suite	Pentaho BI Suite	SQL Power Wabit
Getting Started
Ease of Installation
Example reports available
No SQL knowledge required
Training Offered
Features
Reporting: Ease of Use
Data sources: JDBC / XML/A / Flat file
Multiple data sources in one report?
Output formats: PDF / HTML / CSV
Report templates
Number of charts available	13	20	14	4
Images can be added
Report Parameters
Report Scheduling
Send reports by email
Client report application
Web-based report creation
OLAP reports
Dashboards
Dashboard allows drill down to details
User can create custom dashboards
Security	()
Support
Frequent posts in forum
Documentation
Paid support available

 

Conclusions

All four tested reporting tools provide the needed features to create basic reports. BIRT is easy to get started with and is well supported but is limited to relational reports since it doesn't support OLAP reports and dashboards. BIRT doesn't have its own security but depends on the security of its underlying application server. Nonetheless, BIRT has seen widespread use, especially embedded in other open source applications.

Although Jaspersoft's BI suite report development environment is more complex, it compensates for this fact with added features and functionality. Jaspersoft allows OLAP analysis but its current open source version doesn't support dashboards. Its report designer gives the user many options to create reports but the web interface lacks usability and functionality.

The most complex product in this comparison is Pentaho's BI suite which includes several client applications for different tasks. The effort users have to make to get started pays itself back in a feature-rich business intelligence solution with a state of the art web interface for medium to larger businesses.

The SQL Power Wabit takes a different approach than all other tested solutions and provides all the functionality to create and view reports in only one application which makes it easy for first time user. In its current version there are some missing features (incl. a web interface, security and parameterized reports) but its ease of use makes this reporting solution a compelling alternative for many organizations.