OpenReports vs The Competition
May 3rd, 2006
I started the OpenReports project to provide an application that could generate dynamic reports, specifically JasperReports, through a browser based interface. Over the last 4 years, OpenReports has grown significantly, in both scope and popularity, largely without any open source competitors.
In the last year or two, the open source business intelligence market has changed a great deal with JasperSoft, Pentaho, and Actuate introducing open source bi tools that compete, at least in some aspects, with OpenReports. Despite the publicity given to these companies and their products, OpenReports has continued to do well and even seems to be gaining popularity.
Now that OpenReports 1.0 has been released and work has started on the next generation of OpenReports, it would be interesting to get some feedback from people who are choosing among the various open source bi tools.
What factors are most important to you when choosing an open source bi tool? Features, stability, ease of use, maturity? Or is the support and backing of a well funded company such as JasperSoft or Pentaho the most important factor?
Entry Filed under: All, OpenReports
6 Comments Add your own
1. Mpume | May 8th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Hi,
First and foremost I would like to congradulate you on a wonderful product. I have spent some time evaluating some Open Source BI tools. For me the simplicity and available functionality are the most appealing aspects. I would like to say that none of the other products compare with OpenReports.
Availabilty of funds does not automatically lead to a good product. I think good ideas and good implementations do not necessarily need a great deal of funding.
Please keep up the good work,
Mpume
South Africa
2. Martin | May 12th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I have just started to introduce myself on this world of opensource BI. I’ll let you know as soon as we have some experience to share, but thank you in advance for this product and I hope you surprise us with the new generation version!!!.
3. Marcelo Magno | May 18th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
I must agre with the others, this is a great piece of software. I Think the simplicity is the key, using velocity templates with the query driven report was a great idea…
IŽd like to contribute a little with some ideas, I think in the query driven report as the first means of the result, but by that page with the results IŽd like to get the printed reports as well (the ones that use the .jasper files).
Think in terms that you could evaluate the jasper file, use the sql the is in the file, present the user with the resultset in the way you do for the query driven one, and let the user export (excel, rtf, pdf - as they already do) but let they print in the same screen the report generated by the jasper file.
By this you could then do a more elaborated work in the velocity template to allow BI like customisations of the result set (like groping, hidding colums, etc)…
Just some Ideas… hope that they would be helpfull.
4. Amit Gupta | May 25th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
This is exactly I was looking for. Its a complete reporting solution and I am also in full agreement with you that creating a great product is all about passion and has nothing to do with the VC funding.
I am considering it using within my framework. Thanks once again for the wonderful work.
Cheers,
Amit
http://www.analyticsworks.com/
http://www.analyticsworks.com/blog/
5. Ghislain Bob Hachey | May 29th, 2006 at 8:59 pm
First congradulation for your great product. I have been using it for about 10 months now within our organization. It is our primary reporting tools along with iReport to design the reports.
For me what is important is definetaly statility, eased of use, and does the required good. I will not always be here with my host organization and it is important for them that it will “just work” and it does.
Only thing, and maybe this has changed, but I did not like the compatibiblty issues with iReports. The reports have to be compile with the same version of JasperReport which can be confusing for my counterparts when upgrading or stuff like that. But that’s minor.
Thanks and keep up the good work. I will certainly stick with OpenReports for years to come.
6. Demetrios Kyriakis | June 22nd, 2006 at 3:32 pm
What about ObjectVisualizer ? It looks really impressive and it has even more downlods than openreports.
.
Are there any plans to develop it further? It looks like more than a year there’s no change to it
Thank you,
D.
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