Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime?

Z0mb1eman asks: "My company is considering replacing our aging CrystalReports with an open source solution. We are currently doing our research, and the choices seem promising -- JasperReports, Actuate-backed BIRT, and Pentaho, which seems to combine other open-source reporting tools. All have some level of commercial support, but are they ready to replace established solutions like Crystal Reports or even Actuate? Is your company using an Open Source reporting tool, and what have been your experiences with such tools? Are there any other choices we should consider? What should we expect if we make the decision to switch?"

Comments

JasperReports

[speedy1161]

At my former place (a Fortune 50 retailer), we used JasperReports for a lot of our internal reporting needs. Generating PDF's for the web-applications, XLS docs for the business folks, and using all OS/Free software to do it.

We used JasperAssistant to create the reports, training even non-technical folks on how to create the reports they needed. The reports they made weren't going to win awards, but they got what they wanted and we saved time.

Just be aware that the JasperReports libs do their own thread management (at least it did as of the pre-1.2 release) so be aware of running inside of a J2EE container. We chose to write an asynchronous app that utilized JMS and a java daemon that read the queue and processed the messages, storing the output as a BLOB in a db.

Re:JasperReports

[chellbelle1000]

I was asked to find a web based solution to replace Crystal Reports. I decided upon Jasper Reports, which as a programmer I found to be great. There is a lot of choice in report designers - the ones I tried were iReport, Jasper Assistant (eclipse plugin). As a programmer, I found these great to work with. I also found it easy to integrate into our java web application, with the use of both database and xml datasources. It was also easy to print the report to pdf or html.

The graphing support is not as advanced as that in Crystal, I had to hand code a lot and therefore it would have been impossible for non-programmers/customers to include graphs in reports.
I also found it difficult to replicate the "drill down" feature in Crystal Reports.
Both of these points were extremely important in the replacement solution, and thus Jasper Reports was scrapped, deemed not to be as user friendly, and rich in advanced features as crystal :(.

So, I guess - moral to the story - make sure you have a set of clear features you require and that what you decide meets them.

I use BIRT

[Anonymous Coward]

I was the first easy to use system that had powerful report creation. You can drag and drop from palette to create a layout which is pretty nice. It has smart charts (coloring based on marker values), PDF and HTML output. It supports POJOs (scripted), JDO, JDBC, Hibernate and is fully integrated with Eclipse if you are into that side of things.

Another good thing is that Actuate has really responsive support and there are lots of examples, tutorials, and online help, etc.

The only real downside so far - installation is a bear (they have promised to fix this soon) and there are still some bugs here and there (though they are responsive via newsgroup, bugzilla, and email.)

Cognos should be on your short list

[camt]

I'm a Reporting Engineer, so business intelligence is my speciality. I do not work for a company that sells BI software or services, I'm just an administrator/power user. I've used BIRT, Crystal Reports, Crystal for Eclipse, MS SQL Reporting Services, Excel PivotTables with SQL Analysis Server cubes, Proclarity, Cognos ReportNet, Cognos Impromptu and Cognos PowerPlay.

Business Objects seems to have a pretty solid platform these days, but the company tends to use underhanded advertising techniques and make dubious claims in their marketing material. I'm not sure how they are once you are a customer, but I have been unimpressed with their sales pitches to me. Microsoft SQL 2005 has some pretty neat tools bundled. They have really come a long way, and they are fantastic on the back-end or for use internally to the IT department, but they really have nothing in the way of user-facing front-ends that I would consider ready for "prime time". BIRT looks promising, and within a decade I would say it will be fantastic software.

I highly recommend looking at Cognos Series 8. The back-end is a web services based framework and the zero client front ends blows everything else I have seen out of the water. It is simply the best platform I have *ever* used, though it can be a bit pricey. They used to work with you quite a bit on the price; not sure if they still do that with their new named-user-based licensing model. Their support is excellent as well. I was an early adopter of ReportNet, and Cognos flew an engineer down to our site on their dime to troubleshoot a critical bug; we were not a big site, at only 60ish end-users.

Call up a Cognos rep, they are usually willing to come on-site to do a demo.

Re:Cognos should be on your short list

[mooingyak]

I currently use (aka am stuck with) Cognos. While there's pretty much no chance of us replacing Cognos with something else, we've recently also looked BIRT, Actuate (actuate is currently supporting the BIRT project), Oracle, Crystal Reports, and Jasper Reports among other things. They don't really occupy the same market space. There is some conceptual overlap, but Cognos (or at least, what I've used from Cognos) tends to be a snapshot image of data while the various other solutions are more along the lines of on-demand reporting against a potentially volatile database.

Re:Cognos should be on your short list

[popeyethesailor]

Cognos is probably overkill for canned reporting. Something like Reporting services should be good enough. Adhoc querying on the other hand, may need some BI tools like Cognos.

Re:Cognos should be on your short list

[GuyverDH]

Business Objects, once you are a customer, spends more effort in telling you why your problem isn't their problem, even when you use their *default* installation and setup.

They are constantly changing the layouts and deployment locations of their sub-components, and make it nearly impossible to throw a decent proxy front-end on their applet, so that it can fit into a standard (for our company) multi-tiered/multi-firewalled layout.

It used to be that the docroot for all applets was /businessobjects, now they are moving them in a seemingly random manner. That's not the biggest problem either. Their current incarnation, will not allow the web server front end to be configured for SSL, while their Tomcat listener is non-ssl. For some reason, they hard-code the url components to be non-ssl, and the proxies we've tried cannot override this (at least the time we've spent attempting this has been unsuccessful). We finally enabled SSl at the application layer, and changed the proxy to simply use a passthru mode. It's ugly and it's not what we'd prefer to be doing.

We've been waiting close to 6 months for a fix to this problem. One they were able to reproduce in their office, 6 months ago. Recently, when asked by us about the status, they stated that "We were finally able to reproduce the problem, and have sent it off to engineering." When we mentioned the fact that that's where we were at 6 months ago - they were like "Oh!"...

Anyway - that's a customer's experience with Business Objects - and to put it mildly.... In my opinion, it sucketh greatly.

Re:Cognos should be on your short list

[camt]

Cognos has a whole range of products. We used their OLAP product as well as their web-based ad-hoc product. They also have Dashboarding and scorecarding and metrics management...

On the backend, I think Cognos OLAP is just slightly better than MS SQL Analysis Services, but they are roughly equavalent for most uses. On the front-end, however, MS relies on Excel PivotTables, which totally SUCK. Cognos has an entirely web-based OLAP front end that is very intuitive and extremely powerful. This is by far the piece that is the biggest value-add above going with something open source or "bundled" (MSSQL).

The other major difference between tools like Business Objects and Cognos versus things like BIRT and MS SQL Reporting Services is report delivery and security. The latter may be fine report authoring tools, but you are still just emailing the output to the users. The former have customizable web-based portals that allow for automatic sceduling, emailing, and manage your security access (using LDAP) to different report pieces. E.g. nobody but our finance department was allowed to see Royalties. Just set the security once in the metadata, and voila - don't have to worry about emailing the wrong thing to the wrong people.

As far as costs are concerned, I think Cognos runs about US$1000-$2000/user depending on their capabilities. Report authors and administrators were more, but generally you don't have many of those. Well worth it, IMHO. It is not simply a matter of "we'll save this many man-hours using more efficient tools", it is more like "this provides capabilities that we do not even have today, but that we require". Then again, if you don't need it, it would be a waste.

Re:Why are you switching?

[NoMoreBits]

Well, something may be working, but there are bugs in Crystal Reports that become more annoying as time goes by.

For example we embedded Crystal Reports into one of the applications as an easy way for our product customers to get the data in a nice printable form. A number of our customers had created their own custom reports. While working on the new version of our app we discovered a few bugs in CR that prevent us to do things more flexibly, specifically automate creation of report styles as data complexity and its amount grew. Crystal Decisions couldn't fix those issues in version 8 and just advised us to move on to a new version of their product.

Now we need to make decision:

• 1) Invest money and lots of time to upgrade to a new version of embedded Crystal Reports
• 2) Give our customers awkward instructions to update their report styles manually
• 3) Dump Crystal Reports and use something else, preferably open source

If you go for open source then you could at least do a quick bug fix yourself, so this option is very tempting. Unfortunately I am not aware of any open source reporting packages that are not Java and could offer as much functionality as Crystal Reports do. That includes advanced groupings based on a rich library of math and string functions fyi.

Re:Why are you switching?

[Timothy Chu]

First off, I'll state that I do work for Business Objects.

Version 8...that's almost six years old (quite old in terms of reporting technology). Are you developing with Report Designer Component (RDC)? We currently support report modification through something called a RAS API, which might suit your needs. It can be accessed through .NET (which is how most of our RDC customers upgraded). Unfortunately, this is a completely different API from RDC. The good news is that the reports format itself is backwards compatible.

I'm not in sales, so I can't tell you how much it would cost compared to open source alternatives. All I can do is tell you that it can be done.

Jasper Reports is Good.

[natmsincome.com]

We were using Jasper Reports with IReport and OpenReports for about a year until management got jumpy and not being able to hire anyone with Jasper expereince and migrated to Crystal.

From my expeience it was great. The only thing it didn't do for us was Cross Tab reports but that was added after we'd migrated to Crystal. It's been around the longest and has a fairly nice base of third party apps. I had a look at some of the other solutions but at that time they were still in Alpha. It's nice to see that they've made lots of progress.

So personaly I'd recommend checking out Jasper for a day and going from there.

Experience

[scottsevertson]

JasperReports has worked well for me in many situations, and the report file format (XML) is easy enough to work with, even without a designer front end. Performance in most use cases is respectable, and I didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things running. Whenever I need "traditional" reporting, JasperReports is my first choice.

My current company is in the process of migrating away from Actuate e.Report, which has basically (but unofficially) been EOLed. For example, it'll run under Java 1.5, but every report logs an IOException during generation, and no fix is planned. Performance on large documents (read 1k+ pages) is unusable, and gets significantly worse as the page count increases (not exponentially, but worse than linearly). Oh, and don't plan on your users editing the RTFs it spits out - everything uses absolute positioning within the document, so the page doesn't reflow.

I spent some quality time with BIRT last month, but wasn't terribly impressed. Installation wasn't painless, and their underlying model assumes that your data is a flat, relational table. Our data is hierarchical in nature, and we would have had to either flatten it, or use tons of sub-reports to accomplish our goals. Additionally, the options for output format are pretty limited compared with other solutions.

We ended up setting with Windward Reports, for two main reasons:
1. They assume hierarchical data instead of relational.
2. Their design front end is any RTF editor, and produces editable RTF results (and can still output to HTML, PDF, etc).

Performance with Windward has been an order of magnitude better that e.Report in our worst cases, and they've been quite good about implementing minor new features that we needed.

A couple issues:
1. They're not open source, and are relatively pricey, especially when you're an Application Service Provider.
2. The code that is open (such as thier data adapters) has a strange license, and hasn't been actively cleaned up in a while. Their license requires that you submit any non-company-specific improvements made to a data adapter back to them.
3. Their documentation is not up to date with their latest feature set, so be prepared to look at change logs, or ask questions on their forums. On the other hand, their tech support has been excellent.

We considered a number of other innovative reporting solutions as well. Just make sure that the reporting solution you pick actually meets your data and user's requirements, and don't be afraid to look beyond the "standard" reporting systems if you have non-traditional needs.

More details...

[Z0mb1eman]

Wow, my first accepted submission :) At last, an excuse to read Slashdot at work tomorrow!

I kept the submission fairly general, to avoid steering the discussion in any specific direction. Here are a few more details of our situation:

We're a small-to-medium business, and our reporting needs are relatively modest (at the moment - we are steadily growing). I would say no more than 10-20 people need to generate reports. Our software department is also quite small - we have a fair amount of in-house Java expertise, but no one who actually knows Crystal Reports. We're also using an old version, and the reports themselves are out of date. Our choices are to invest in a new version of Crystal, the time for one of us to learn it, and rewriting the reports anyway - or choosing an open-source Java solution and hope for the best. The constraint, as always, is very limited manpower...

Any feedback is welcome - I've seen some very good posts already, I'll have to read all the comments tomorrow in detail.

Thanks!

Re:More details...

[camt]

Cognos segments their licensing this way, but I have found it is a good way to think about reporting in general.

Segment the people in your company into four groups:

1) Report Consumers - people who consume reports. Generally this is simply the people receiving an email with their Excel report attached.

2) Power Users - these are your business analysts. They are capable of self-servicing their reporting needs to a limited extent, if the interface is simple enough. These are the people who are savvy with Access.

3) Report Authors - people who know your data inside and out, and understand how it applies to the business. In every company I have worked at, this role is inside the IT department. They have the robust reporting tools.

4) Reporting Administrators - people who manage the report server, as well as define the metadata structure. Often this can overlap with a DBA Role. They need to understand about database relationships, cardinality, and also know the data inside and out, but not necessarily how it applies to the business.

Also think about your uses for reporting. In general, reporting is in nature operational (customer called in and needs a copy of an invoice or a current statement of accounts), tactical (we need to generate a customer list for this marketing campaign using certain criteria so we can send a mailing) or stategic (high level executive view of the business).

Hope this helps.

ActiveReports

[claytongulick]

Though its not open source, I would recommend ActiveReports. Extremely flexible, even gives you a drawing API, and its totally isolated from the backend (unlike crystal and such) - you just hand it a dataset (in .net) and off you go. In my consulting days, I swore by it. Very simple and robust, also quite affordable. Just my $.02 .

Re:Why are you switching?

[ka6wke]

The good news is that the reports format itself is backwards compatible.

Well, mostly this is true. I have several reports from CR5 days, that have had small modifications to them over the years, then saved as the newer format. After so many saved as,this will cause the report to not work like the previous version. What I've had to do to get around this was to create a new blank Crystal Report, in my last case in XI, recreate all the db connections, gather all the tables, and recreate all the links. Then, start copying over elements from the old formatted report to the new one. The new report will work just fine after that point. So, not sure what the differences are between formats that cause issues with tables and linking... What would be really cool would be the .rpt file format spec...