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Are Open Source Reporting Tools Ready for Primetime?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the information-in-black-white-and-red dept.

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?"

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Why are you switching? by Timothy+Chu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You haven't talked about why you'd want to switch. If something works, why change it?

  2. Depends what you need! by mikeburke · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have you identified what your requirements are from a reporting tool, be it open source or commercial? Your definition of 'prime time' is totally dependent on this

    - who will be writing the reports (techies, business folks, both)?
    - what layout and formatting capabilities are absolutely needed?
    - any really big reports? performance may be an issue
    - what are the security needs - authentication, visibility, auditing, etc?
    - do you need overnight automated report runs?
    - what about bursting (automatically splitting a report into sub-reports based on department, product type, whatever)?
    - do you need to integrate with custom developed software? what language+platform, etc?

    The first point is particularly important - if business staff want to dolly up simple adhoc reports, then this will seriously narrow down the open source field pretty quickly.