Open Source Alternative to Pentaho

• Technology Stack: Helical Insight is built on Java and frontend is react.
  Pentaho: Backend is Java, frontend is HTML CSS JS.
  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 3^rd party application as well.
  Whereas talking about Pentaho, in case if you would like to create Pentaho reports you would need to depend on a desktop application called Pentaho Report Designer and the output file of this then needs to be deployed on the server. ADhoc reports dashboards and other functionalities though can be done from the browser itself

• BI on Cloud Offering: Helical Insight and Pentaho, both are completely cloud compatible and can work on any cloud like AWS, Azure, GCP etc. However both the companies do not provide any managed BI on cloud service as of now.

• Versions : Both Helical Insight and Pentaho 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.
  Pentaho: Only executable installer available. Pentaho also provides required configuration files to support deployment on Docker and Kubernetes

• Inbuilt visualizations: The number of by default visualizations supported by Superset are more compared to Helical Insight. Superset comes with multiple charts for various uses, including funnel chart, gauges, Radar charts, Timeseries charts, Pivot tables and tree charts also. It gives you a wide variety of charts which will cover most of situations. However, if you run into a situation where you need any different chart there is no possible way to add more chart to it.
  Helical Insight, on the other hand, 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.
  Pentaho : jfree charts. Some community plugins for more charts
  Pentaho ee : fusion charts

• UI Driven Customization: The UI driven customizations at superset are limited, however Helical Insight provides much more UI driven customization options for the reports and dashboards.
  Pentaho is also providing quite a few UI driven customizations options for charts.

• 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).
  Superset does not have that kind of flexibility.
  Ability to add code while designing the adhoc reports in not present in Pentaho.

• 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. Whereas Superset does not support grid charting option.
  Pentaho is not supporting this kind of grid charts.

• Drill Down, Drill Through & Interpanel Communication: Superset is highly inflexible in terms of allowing drill down, drill through and inter panel communication. Though there seems to be some work going on around that currently.
  Whereas 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 interpanel 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.
  Pentaho is also supporting drill down, drill through and inter panel communication kind of options.

• Folder Concept:Helical Insight has concept of folders, subfolders (which can go to any level), public folders etc. Hence saving, managing, sharing etc is much more easier task than superset.

• 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.
  Pentaho is also having various kind of filtering options based on the data types. However it does not have options like apply DBfunctions and use that as a filter, control of display and value, display something and pass something else to where clause kind of options are not present here.

• Advanced options while creating reports: Helical Insight has options like custom columns, hide, fetch and hide kind of options.
  Pentaho is having hide/unhide field concept.

PERFORMANCE LAYER

• Helical Insight and Pentaho 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 Pentaho has caching which aids in enhancing performance.
• Helical Insight and Pentaho, 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 Pentaho (Mondrian)
• 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 Pentaho.

• 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.
  Pentaho: It provides SDK for embedding the reports. Various methods of embedding includes Iframe, Pentaho libraries, REST API

• 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.
  Pentaho: At this time, only Central Authentication Service (CAS) and Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) are supported. Custom Authentication method of SSO is also supported.

• New chart addition : Both Helical Insight and Pentaho allows you to add any other visualization / create visualization and add it into it.
• New DB driver support: Both Helical Insight as well as Pentaho allows you to make connection to any external DB which is by default not supported by uploading 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. Whereas that is not possible in Pentaho.
• 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 Pentaho.
• Various configurable files : Helical Insight provides a lot of configurable XML files like settings.xml, cachce.xml, springsecurity.xml, validation.xml, web.xml etc which can be configured. In a similar way Pentaho is also providing various kind of configurable XML files as well.

• 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 Pentaho supports both traditional canned reporting as well as drag drop based dashboarding and data visualization capabilities also.

• 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 Pentaho does not have any sort of workflow functionality. In fact very old version of Pentaho had something called xAction which could allow to write something similar but it was deprecated long back.

• Helical Insight and Pentaho, both are having free community version with limited features.
• 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. Pentaho is having limited kind of pricing options.
• Helical Insight is more than 85-90% more cost affective than Pentaho.

• Both Helical Insight and Pentaho allows option to white label BI product.

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.