Comparing BI tools
Today, my colleague and I finished the 2019 version of the Business Intelligence Tools Survey. In this survey, a comparison is made between JasperSoft vs Pentaho and 17 other Business Intelligence tools. Both tools are classified as open source, but for commercial installations you have to pay. How do these two open source BI tools compare?
Pentaho as Enterprise BI platform and Jaspersoft as niche player?
The main difference in our view is that Pentaho BI is suitable as an enterprise business intelligence platform, whereas Jaspersoft should be categorized as a niche player. We did compare the business intelligence tools on 197 business-critical selection criteria, which are put into 15 useful categories like core functionality, infrastructure, usability, connectivity and so forth. Based on our independent research Pentaho BI scores much higher in almost every category.
BI tools compared: BI Tools Survey
Besides JasperSoft and Pentaho, PG's BI Tools Survey reviews 17 other BI Tools. The Business Intelligence Tools Survey is a 100% vendor independent, extensive comparison report and market analysis. Use it to choose the best tool / platform for your situation very quickly and save lots of time and money. Download now.Make a profound decision between these two open source BI tools
Both BI & reporting tools lack facilities for performance management which can be seen as typically for open source compared to commercial software. Pentaho scores also much better in the category ‘usability & visualization’ and has more native connectors to databases and other data sources. If you want to make a profound decision between these two open source BI tools, you may want to consider buying the Business Intelligence Tools Survey 2019.
Extract from our survey about Jaspersoft
“Together with Pentaho they are by far the cheapest BI solution in the market, but they appear to be well behind their competitors in terms of functionality and infrastructure. In a marketplace where it is essential that the products be easier to use if we are going to reach the users who need the information that BI systems provide, Jaspersoft scores a dismal 4.3 out of 13 points in comparison with (much more expensive) products that score as high as 11. Good Business Intelligence tools help us predict the future (even though it is difficult) and this is something that is currently not included in the product. As a basic report writer the product is adequate, but if you are looking for something more it is not (yet) available in Jaspersoft.” (partial results)
Extract from our survey about Pentaho BI
“Pentaho is the best known and probably the most used of the open source Business Intelligence products. With 8.000 customer installations they are now positioned at the lower end of the middle sized BI software suppliers which include companies like Microstrategy and Qlik. They score relatively well in the categories of usability, performance and security which is essential for expanding their market share. Currently they don’t have many large implementations, nothing bigger than 1.000 users. For many of their potential customers that would certainly be large enough but in comparison with companies like Microstrategy and Information Builders who have installations with hundreds of thousands of users, it is relatively modest, and may be an issue if they want to extend their market share to very large organizations. As a strength Pentaho have a complete product offering (their data integration product is evaluated in our ETL Tools & Data Integration Survey) as a weakness we don’t yet see much predictive analysis and no performance management facilities. Integration with Microsoft Office and support for more portal technologies will need to be improved if they wish to reach a wider customer base.” (partial results)
