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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?"

4 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Pentaho? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sounds like a word in the educated pimp's dictionary.

    pentaho -noun: A group of 5 hos.

    Ideally, you need to have a pentaho on each corner you control.

  2. I use BIRT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.)

  3. 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.

  4. Cognos should be on your short list by camt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.