Open Source Alternative To Superset / Preset BI Tool

• Technology Stack: Helical Insight is built on Java and frontend is react. Whereas Superset is built on Python and JS HTML. Both Helical Insight and Superset are completely browser based products.

• 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.

  However Preset is the superset offering on cloud.

• Versions : Superset has the same version. Hence if you deploy and use it locally, then you don’t have to pay. Whereas if you use Superset cloud version (offered as Preset) then you will be paying. Though Preset seems to have some more additional features as compared to Superset.

  Whereas Helical Insight community version can also be hosted on client’s own servers and is completely free. While Helical Insight community version requires more technical expertise, the Superset free version is more easier to use as compared to Helical Insight community version.

• Distribution: With support for options like Docker, kubernetes etc installation and distribution across various servers is possible with Helical Insight. The same is also supported by Superset by its community members.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Folder Concept: Superset does not have concept of folder. Everything is present in the same folder, hence organizing it tenant wise or role wise, managing it etc is always a very difficult task.

  Whereas 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.

  Whereas Superset has got limited filtering conditions.

• Advanced options while creating reports: Helical Insight has options like custom columns, hide, fetch and hide kind of options. These kind of options are not present in Superset.

• As superset makes you create a view on top of which only reporting can be done, the performance is always in general low as compared to Helical Insight. Helical Insight allows you to create reports from any tables (from same DB or across any other DB also) using the joins and in-memory.
• Helical Insight 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 Superset has caching which aids in enhancing performance.
• Helical Insight and Superset, 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. This is not supported in Superset.
• 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 Superset.

• Embedding: Superset allows iframe method to integrate.

  Whereas 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.

• Single Sign On: Superset allows SSO methods which includes JWT, token authentication methods, oAuth, oAuth 2.0.

  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.

EXTENSIBILITY

• New chart addition : Both Helical Insight and Superset allows you to add any other visualization / create visualization and add it into it.
• New DB driver support: Both Helical Insight as well as Superset allows you to make connection to any external DB which is by default not supported. Helical Insight is built on java, so you need to use JDBC driver followed by configuring the dialect file, whereas in case of Superset you need to upload the python driver followed by configuring the dialect file.
• 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 superset.
• 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 Superset.
• 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 Superset also provides some configurable py files (in case if you install and use Superset on-prem, not the Preset)

• Canned reporting can allow users to create pixel perfect multi-pager document kind of reports like invoices, salary slips, bank statements etc. Superset is only having support of dashboard but does not support canned reporting. Whereas Helical Insight 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 Superset does not have any sort of workflow functionality.

• Helical Insight has a free community version. Similarly Superset is free if you install and manage and maintain at your own servers.
• 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. Whereas Preset comes at $25 per user pricing, hence the BI license cost will keep on increasing as your business grows.

• Both Helical Insight and superset 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.

  However in superset there are options of setting configuration for different language via console. Language pack also will have to be created by the user and uploaded which is to be used.