Open Source Report Engine Comparison
Now that OpenReports 2.1 includes support for Eclipse BIRT and improvements to existing support for JFreeReport and JXLS, I thought it would be a good time to post my thoughts on the open source reporting engines supported by OpenReports:
JasperReports
- Easiest to integrate and most flexible from a developers standpoint.
- Supports a large number of export formats.
- Report designer is not as easy to use as others.
Eclipse BIRT
- Excellent report designer and charting support.
- Great support for reports will multiple datasources.
- Harder to integrate with OpenReports then other engines.
JFreeReport
- Nice report designer.
- TableModel based API can restrictive.
- Does not seem very active from a community or development standpoint.
JXLS
- Excellent choice for Excel reports.
- Does not require a report designer.
- Supports multiple queries in one report.
- Only supports Excel output and not very well known.
At this point I would recommend OpenReports ChartReports for simple charts, OpenReports QueryReports for small table based reports, JasperReports or Eclipse BIRT for general reporting requirements, and JXLS for complex Excel reports.
I’m not sure about JFreeReport at this point. Even though it’s now owned by Pentaho, it does not seem very active. If I had to guess, I would bet a large number of Pentaho users are using other reporting engines such as Eclipse BIRT and JasperReports with Pentaho.
Anyone out there try more then one of these reporting engines recently? What are your thoughts?
13 comments November 6th, 2006
