Open Source Alternative To Jaspersoft

In this blog we are going to cover a comparison of Open Source BI product Helical Insight with another Open Source BI product Jaspersoft.

We would be covering on all points comparison. Where Jaspersoft performs better and points where Helical Insight performs better, we would be covering an all honest review below. This comparison is written as on Nov-2022 and to the best of our knowledge. Please do update us if there is some incorrect information which needs to be changed.
HELICAL INSIGHT VERSUS JASPERSOFT

DEPLOYMENT

  • Technology Stack: Helical Insight is built on Java and frontend is react.
    Jaspersoft: Backend is Java and SpringMVC, frontend is HTML5.

    Helical Insight is a completely browser based product, so all the functionalities like reports creations, dashboards creation, server management, embedding, email scheduling etc can be done from the browser itself. This gives the advantage that even if you go to a new device, new location etc you can always create additional reports and dashboards. This also gives the advantage that even the designer interface can also be integrated into any 3rd party application as well.
    Whereas talking about Jaspersoft, in case if you would like to create Jasper reports you would need to depend on a desktop application called Jasper Reports and the output file of this then needs to be deployed on the server.

  • BI on Cloud Offering: Helical Insight is completely cloud compatible and can work on any cloud like AWS, Azure, GCP etc. However Helical Insight company does not provide any managed BI on cloud service as of now.
    Jaspersoft: Jasper Report services have different offerings from Azure and AWS servers, and they also offer BYOL cloud services
  • Versions : Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft have a community version which has got limited features as well as enterprise version which has got all the features.

 

  • Distribution: With support for options like Docker, kubernetes etc installation and distribution across various servers is possible with Helical Insight. Jaspersoft also supports docker.

DATA SOURCES LAYER

  • Number of datasources:Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft are Java based applications, they need JDBC driver to connect to a database. Even there are options of uploading a customer JDBC driver as well.
  • Data from different databases: Helical Insight, with it’s in-memory support (released from version 5.0 GA), allows you to connect more than one database at the same time, do a cross db join and create reports. Hence you can have data from more than one sources like Oracle, SQLServer etc and do a crossdb join and create reports. Helical Insight is in fact the only open source BI tool allowing you to do that.

    • Jaspersoft  can also allow you to use VDS (virtual data source) which can allow to connect and use more than one datasource. However Jaspersoft VDS does seem to have lot of performance issue.

  • Data from two or more tables: Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft can allow to define joins and create reports.
  • Dynamic DB Switching: Helical Insight allows advanced options like allowing to switch the report dashboard based on certain conditions like organization name, role, profile value etc of the loggedin user. Similar kind of functionalities is also provided by Jaspersoft also.
  • Middleware connection: Helical Insight can allow to connect to middlewares like Apache Drill, Dremio etc which can in turn connect to many other DBs also. That is not supported by Jaspersoft.
REPORTING AND VISUALIZATION LAYER

  • Inbuilt visualizations:
    Helical Insight gives you lots of options of charts which covers most of the scenarios like timeseries chart, pie chart, donut chart, table, pivot view, heatmap, stacked bar etc. Moreover, it allows you to add custom charts to the application as well. Thus, if you run into a situation where you need more visualization, you are covered.
    Hence as a end user, a client can themselves add more visualizations.
    Jaspersoft Community edition provides jFree charts which are non responsive flash based charts with poor look and feel and interactivity. The adhoc interface of Jaspersoft enterprise edition comes with High charts options. Jaspersoft is also having an option called CVC (custom visualization component) allowing to integrate any external visualization.
  • UI Driven Customization: Helical Insight provides many UI driven customization options for the customizing the reports and dashboards look and feel as well as functionalities. Whereas Jaspersoft has got limited set of customization options. Though it has exposed high charts api, allowing users to directly call HighCharts API and tweak it, though it is not very intuitive and easy to use.
  • Code at Report level: When you create visualizations, Helical Insight allows you to add certain HTML, CSS and JS code at report level. You can also specify when exactly this code will be executed. It can be executed at 4 levels i.e. Pre-Fetch (before SQLQuery gets executed), Pre-Execution (before SQLQuery gets executed), Post-Fetch (before SQLQuery gets executed), Post-Execution (before SQLQuery gets executed).
    Jaspersoft, not much options available on J3 charts that are used in Jaspersoft Reports as per web or UI based. You can customize by changing code values directly from high chart API. Which is cumbersome process, a UI driven interface would have been better. Jaspersoft allows to add HTML while designing report but not CSS and Javascript.
  • Grid Chart: Tableau had introduced a grid kind of charting option wherein it has separate placeholder for rows and columns. Based on the fields dragged here, it creates a grid within which visualization gets created.
    Helical Insight also has got placeholder for rows and columns and supports grid kind of charting. It is the only BI tool (except Tableau) which is supporting Grid charting. Then layers are present like shape, size, color, tooltip etc.

    Jaspersoft is also not having that kind of grid charting option.

  • Drill Down, Drill Through & Interpanel Communication: Helical Insight supports drill down wherein you can click and see more granular data across a hierarchy or based on where we are clicking and what we pass. UI driven drill through is also supported wherein you can drill through to a granular data which can be of a different visualization type also. With inter-panel communication, you can have a dashboard wherein you click on a chart and all other pieces of the dashboard can get updated. Helical Insight allows these kind of drill down, drill through, inter panel communication, from the UI drag drop interface itself. Drill down allows to define a hierarchy and drill up drill down based on that or based on where you click and see more granular data for that.
    Jaspersoft has only drill through option wherein you need to create a separate child report with filters, and link it which is more time consuming and cumbersome. Jaspersoft also supports interpanel communication. It does not support drill down options though (except only for crosstab visualization created only through Mondrian cube).
  • Folder Concept: Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft has got concepts of folder, subfolders etc
    (which can go to any level), public folders etc which is used for saving the work, sharing etc.
  • Filtering Conditions: Helical Insight provides exhaustive filtering conditions, cascading filtering options, options to control display and apply DBfunctions on display, show something and pass something else to SQL clauses, relative date filtering. Filtering conditions also depends a lot on the kind of data.
    Jaspersoft is having various kind of filtering options. But advanced filtering options like applying dbfunctions and then using that as a filter, control display and value, display something and pass something else as filter value kind of advanced filtering options are not there.
  • Advanced options while creating reports: Helical Insight has options like custom columns, hide, fetch and hide kind of options.
    Jaspersoft: supports filtering conditions, concept of pre-filter, and advanced filtering options also exist. It allows column hiding also

DASHBOARD

  • Customizations on dashboard: Helical Insight gives you a blank canvas for dashboard where you can create your own layout and design with all drags/drop or clicks. Alignments, Headers, border, shadow, background, grouping, images, text component is all available via front end UI driven options.
    Jaspersoft also has got only limited dashboard customization options.
  • Code support at dashboard: Helical Insight also allows you to write HTML, CSS, Javascript for any specific component in the dashboard layer. Liquid template language support is also present at Helical Insight, thus allowing condition based styling based on filter values & session variables like username organization name etc. There is hardly any other BI product which is supporting liquid template language.
    Jasper only allows to put CSS.
PERFORMANCE LAYER

  • Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft has got pagination at report level which loads the tabular data 10 by 10 records, thus allowing users to start viewing the reports. This helps in giving quick performance.
  • Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft has caching which aids in enhancing performance.
  • Helical Insight and Jaspersoft, both allows implementation of BI at multiple load balancing servers.
  • Helical Insight, version 5.0 GA onwards, is also allowing support of cubes. Cubes will allow create custom calculations and save prebuilt calculations, thus allowing very high performance. Mondrian cube is also supported in Jaspersoft also.
  • In-memory: When the data is more, helical insight can allow you to load the data into inmemory. Now the report creation happens from the local RAM memory, hence the performance can be extremely fast even with very huge amount of data. This is not supported in Jaspersoft

DATA SECURITY

  • Authorization: Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft are multi-tenant application. There is 4 layers of security i.e. Organization, Roles, Users and Profiles. A user can have multiple roles, can have multiple profiles and each profile can also have multiple profile values also. You can use combinations to have the right authorization and access control. While implementing data security also it is possible to define
EMBEDDING AND SINGLE SIGN ON LAYER

  • Embedding: Helical Insight provides multiple different methods to integrate like iframe, object tag, embed tag as well as a javascripting layer called embedJS. There are security issues when we integrate with iframe as well as there are responsiveness issues, so in those cases embedJS method can be used for integration.
    In case of Jaspersoft it’s methods of embedding includes visualizejs, iFrame and Jasper libraries.
  • Single Sign On: Helical Insight SSO support includes JWT, oauth, oauth 2.0, custom token based authentication mechanism, CAS, LDAP, ADFS. The JWT method can be further enhanced for any other methods like SAML, okta etc.
    Jaspersoft also supports various SSO methods like CAS LDAP ADFS token authentication mechanism etc.

API SUPPORT

  • Helical Insight has always had an API first approach. Each and every single functionality of Helical Insight is supported by APIs, thus allowing you to automate those tasks, recreate the frontend design and make use of backend.
    In a similar way Jaspersoft is also providing access to many different APIs also.
EXTENSIBILITY

  • New chart addition : Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft allows you to add any other visualization / create visualization and add it into it.
  • New DB driver support: Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft allows to add new DBdriver support by using custom JDBC driver
  • New db function: For every DB, there is a configurable DB XML file, so Helical Insight allows you to open that file and add more and more DBFunctions which can then be used from the frontned very easily. This is something not possible in Jaspersoft.
  • New aggregate functions: Similar to above, Helical Insight also allows you to add more aggregate functions, hence if your DB supports you can add more aggregate functions like Mean, Median, Mode, Std deviation etc. Whereas that is not possible with Jaspersoft.
  • Various configurable files : Helical Insight provides a lot of configurable XML files like settings.xml, cache.xml, springsecurity.xml, validation.xml, web.xml etc which can be configured. Jaspersoft is also having various kind of configurable XML files.

OTHERS

  • Email scheduling : Helical Insight and Jaspersoft allows you to email and email schedule in which the report dashboard can be sent as attachment like CSV & Excel as data export, PDF PNG etc as snapshot export etc options.
  • Exporting : Helical Insight and Jaspersoft very well supports options like exporting in various format like pdf, excel, CSV etc. When canned report is created then the number of provided exporting options are much more.

 

  • Alerting and notification : Not available in both the products. Both the products as of now, is only having time based alerting functionalities.
Canned Reporting Module

  • Canned reporting can allow users to create pixel perfect multi-pager document kind of reports like invoices, salary slips, bank statements etc. Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft supports both traditional canned reporting as well as drag drop based dashboarding and data visualization capabilities also.

NLP AND MACHINE LEARNING MODULE

  • Helical Insight is working on supporting Instant BI. This is something which will allow users to ask questions from their data in natural English language. Hence users can ask questions like “Show me revenue for last 3 months”, “Show me product wise sales in descending order” etc and automatically visualizations will get created. This will make entire process of analytics much more simpler.
    Jaspersoft is not having this functionality.
  • Helical Insight is going to support various kind of inbuilt Machine Learning algorithms like regression, forecasting etc which can help in prediction. This is something not supported in Jaspersoft currently.
WORKFLOW MODULE

  • Helical Insight has a workflow module allowing to create custom workflows and use any internal API or external API inside the workflow. For example rather than email scheduling we want to password encrypt it and save it at S3. Or we want to refresh the cache as soon as an admin user logins. Or automatically creating a folder and saving all the reports in that folder, and then sharing with a new client which is onborded. All these are some basic examples of workflow, workflow can allow much more possibilities. Workflows will allow to create any kind of custom sequence of actions which can be conditional iterative sequential etc.
    Whereas Jaspersoft does not have any sort of workflow functionality.

TRAINING & SUPPORT

  • Support: When you purchase Helical Insight, you are immediately given access to a support portal on which you can raise tickets and assign their priority level. Every ticket is having an SLA within which it is resolved. There is no limit of tickets or questions that you may ask. The resolution is not only a text response on tickets, but also we engage in other ways like video conferencing, screen sharing and hand-holding and guiding wherever necessary.
    Jaspersoft is also having support when you purchase enterprise version but the number of tickets are limited. With professional cloud version of Jaspersoft there is no support. Though there seems to be some options of paid support but it’s very costly.
  • Training: We also provide the joint sessions with partners’ team and train them on the application and its usage. We additionally have proper documentations and even video tutorial for those who want to watch and learn. Jaspersoft also does provide some paid training options.
COSTING

  • Helical Insight and Jaspersoft has free community version.
  • Helical Insight enterprise version comes with various flexible flat pricing options like perpetual one time payment options, distribution options, subscription options based on the deployment. So a client precisely knows how much their cost will be on BI irrespective of features, usage, users etc. Cost of Helical Insight is more than 80% more affordable thatn Jaspersoft. Jaspersoft cost is very high and they do not also have a lot of flexible pricing options.

CUSTOM SERVICES AND DEVELOPMENT

  • At Helical, not only we can provide the product but we can also provide you professional services as well wherein we can help with creation of reports, dashboards, SSO, embedding, workflowsetc. Even a custom feature, if not present in Helical Insight, can also be developed by our team.
    You can also get services directly from Jaspersoft but the manhour rates are extremely high. Also with their services they can not add any custom features but with HelicalInsight we can even add new features also.
WHITE lABELLING

  • Both Helical Insight and Jaspersoft allows option to white label BI product.
  • Jasper pentaho powerbi. Not in quicksight.

CUSTOM NATIVE (ANDROID, IOS)

  • Jaspersoft does have native mobile app, but Helical Insight is not having native mobile app. Having said that the built reports dashboards are completely mobile compatible though (responsive) and can be embedded into mobile apps also.
Localization: With Helical Insight, in whatever language the data is present it will appear in that language in reports and dashboards. Further whenever you are putting text headers or text components, over there also you can write in any language. However uploading a language pack which will convert the entire UI into another language is not present currently.
Jaspersoft also supports localization options via usage of locales and language packs.

ETL CAPABILITIES:

Jaspersoft does not have it’s own ETL tool. Though they have partnered with Talend ETL tool. You can also purchase JasperETL tool (which is rebranded version of Talend). Jaspersoft has build some custom components on Talend ETL for triggering using Jasper JRXML files.

Helical Insight currently does not have any ETL capabilities, though it is in the roadmap.

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Helical Insight’s self-service capabilities is one to reckon with. It allows you to simply drag and drop columns, add filters, apply aggregate functions if required, and create reports and dashboards on the fly. For advanced users, the self-service component has ability to add javascript, HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3 and AJAX. These customizations allow you to create dynamic reports and dashboards. You can also add new charts inside the self-service component, add new kind of aggregate functions and customize it using our APIs.
Helical Insight’s self-service capabilities is one to reckon with. It allows you to simply drag and drop columns, add filters, apply aggregate functions if required, and create reports and dashboards on the fly. For advanced users, the self-service component has ability to add javascript, HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3 and AJAX. These customizations allow you to create dynamic reports and dashboards. You can also add new charts inside the self-service component, add new kind of aggregate functions and customize it using our APIs.
Helical Insight, via simple browser based interface of Canned Reporting module, also allows to create pixel perfect printer friendly document kind of reports also like Invoice, P&L Statement, Balance sheet etc.
Helical Insight, via simple browser based interface of Canned Reporting module, also allows to create pixel perfect printer friendly document kind of reports also like Invoice, P&L Statement, Balance sheet etc.
If you have a product, built on any platform like Dot Net or Java or PHP or Ruby, you can easily embed Helical Insight within it using iFrames or webservices, for quick value add through instant visualization of data.
If you have a product, built on any platform like Dot Net or Java or PHP or Ruby, you can easily embed Helical Insight within it using iFrames or webservices, for quick value add through instant visualization of data.
Being a 100% browser-based BI tool, you can connect with your database and analyse across any location and device. There is no need to download or install heavy memory-consuming developer tools – All you need is a Browser application! We are battle-tested on most of the commonly used browsers.
Being a 100% browser-based BI tool, you can connect with your database and analyse across any location and device. There is no need to download or install heavy memory-consuming developer tools – All you need is a Browser application! We are battle-tested on most of the commonly used browsers.
We have organization level security where the Superadmin can create, delete and modify roles. Dashboards and reports can be added to that organization. This ensures multitenancy.
We have organization level security where the Superadmin can create, delete and modify roles. Dashboards and reports can be added to that organization. This ensures multitenancy.
We have organization level security where the Superadmin can create, delete and modify roles. Dashboards and reports can be added to that organization. This ensures multitenancy.
We have organization level security where the Superadmin can create, delete and modify roles. Dashboards and reports can be added to that organization. This ensures multitenancy.
A first-of-its-kind Open-Source BI framework, Helical Insight is completely API-driven. This allows you to add functionalities, including but not limited to adding a new exporting type, new datasource type, core functionality expansion, new charting in adhoc etc., at any place whenever you wish, using your own in-house developers.
A first-of-its-kind Open-Source BI framework, Helical Insight is completely API-driven. This allows you to add functionalities, including but not limited to adding a new exporting type, new datasource type, core functionality expansion, new charting in adhoc etc., at any place whenever you wish, using your own in-house developers.
It handles huge volumes of data effectively. Caching, Pagination, Load-Balancing and In-Memory not only provides you with amazing experience, but also and does not burden the database server more than required. Further effective use of computing power gives best performance and complex calculations even on the big data even with smaller machines for your personal use. Filtering, Sorting, Cube Analysis, Inter Panel Communication on the dashboards all at lightning speed. Thereby, making best open-source Business Intelligence solution in the market.
It handles huge volumes of data effectively. Caching, Pagination, Load-Balancing and In-Memory not only provides you with amazing experience, but also and does not burden the database server more than required. Further effective use of computing power gives best performance and complex calculations even on the big data even with smaller machines for your personal use. Filtering, Sorting, Cube Analysis, Inter Panel Communication on the dashboards all at lightning speed. Thereby, making best open-source Business Intelligence solution in the market.
With advance NLP algorithm, business users simply ask questions like, “show me sales of last quarter”, “average monthly sales of my products”. Let the application give the power to users without knowledge of query language or underlying data architecture
With advance NLP algorithm, business users simply ask questions like, “show me sales of last quarter”, “average monthly sales of my products”. Let the application give the power to users without knowledge of query language or underlying data architecture
Our application is compatible with almost all databases, be it RDBMS, or columnar database, or even flat files like spreadsheets or csv files. You can even connect to your own custom database via JDBC connection. Further, our database connection can be switched dynamically based on logged in users or its organization or other parameters. So, all your clients can use the same reports and dashboards without worrying about any data security breech.
Our application is compatible with almost all databases, be it RDBMS, or columnar database, or even flat files like spreadsheets or csv files. You can even connect to your own custom database via JDBC connection. Further, our database connection can be switched dynamically based on logged in users or its organization or other parameters. So, all your clients can use the same reports and dashboards without worrying about any data security breech.
Our application can be installed on an in-house server where you have full control of your data and its security. Or on cloud where it is accessible to larger audience without overheads and maintenance of the servers. One solution that works for all.
Our application can be installed on an in-house server where you have full control of your data and its security. Or on cloud where it is accessible to larger audience without overheads and maintenance of the servers. One solution that works for all.
Different companies have different business processes that the existing BI tools do not encompass. Helical Insight permits you to design your own workflows and specify what functional module of BI gets triggered
Different companies have different business processes that the existing BI tools do not encompass. Helical Insight permits you to design your own workflows and specify what functional module of BI gets triggered