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BIRT alternatives for reporting and visualisation services

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.

Solution

  • 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.