Open Source Alternative To Tableau

Open Source Alternative To Tableau

Information fuels the business; however, it requires a precise tool to extract meaningful information from complex and mysterious data lying underneath. Tableau is a market leader when it comes to a powerful data visualization and BI product.

There are some special features that sets apart Tableau from rest of the analytical and business intelligence applications. However, the pricing of the Tableau tool is quite high, there are costs which keeps on increasing the monthly bill like the no of users, data size, features like embedding etc. This makes it very difficult for start-ups to small organizations to use the exciting features of Tableau.

Further Tableau has a desktop based development tool, hence end users can never use it to create reports. Power of creating analysis is only with few people with Tableau desktop.

Looking for a substitute is always a challenge, in terms of features or flexibility or visualizations.

Luckily, we have an open source alternative which comes quite close to Tableau in terms of functionality and user experience, it is Open Source BI product Helical Insight. Being opensource product, it comes at negligible pricing when compared to Tableau. There are even options like one time perpetual pricing, monthly flat pricing, free option etc.

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Get started with Helical Insight. Helical Insight is best Alternative To Tableau

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In this article we shall look on to some of the specific features of Helical Insight which are quite similar to that of Tableau. Hence it can be a good option if you are looking for a cost affective BI alternative to Tableau. Also as you read through the blog you will also understand that, as your resources might have Tableau tool knowledge, they will not have to spend more time in learning this tool.

  • Grid Charts: Tableau had made grid kind of charting very popular with separate rows and columns section. Based on fields in rows and columns, Tableau used to prepare a grid and inside that grid visualization used to come in the form of bar charts, line charts, doughnut charts etc.
    Helical Insight is perhaps the only BI product, apart from Tableau, which supports Grid chart kind of options with the flexibility of Rows, Column and visualizations within it.


  • Marks Options: Similar to Tableau, with the various charts we also have additional layer to analyse the data with Marks options like color, size, shape, label, tooltip, detail etc. available on all visualizations as applicable. On these Marks option you can drag a dimension, measure etc giving a whole new level of analytical approach to a regular chart also. Based on the kind of chart you are in, you will get various kind of customization options.
  • Drilldown: Like Tableau, Drilling down the data and looking at a more granular level information is as simple as selecting the checkbox. Once enabled you can start drilling down and filtering data as per your needs. You can pass one or multiple values while filtering drill down. Also while you filter out the data, you can specify whether you want to “Keep only” or “Exclude”. “Keep Only” means it will drill down with that data only. Whereas “Exclude” means it will show all the data except that specific data points.


  • IPC (Inter-panel-communication): when you want some or all the reports on dashboard to be working in harmony and everyone to be filtering out data based on selection on one of them, inter-panel-communication is there to help you with it. This interpanel communication can allow you to slice and dice the data across any dimension any measure present in any of the charts of the dashboard.


  • Advanced Filtering Options: Filtering options are not limited only to selecting values from a dropdown. We have many more options like cascaded filtering (wherein the value of one filter changes based on the other), choosing different values for displaying while a corresponding column is used in filtering, hiding a certain filter while in view mode, selecting a different filtering condition than just equations or in equations, applying DB functions on the filters themselves, and many more.


  • Date specific Filtering Options: We provide you with a lot of options to use date fields in filters. You can decide what an end user should select (like year, quarter, month, week, date, day, time, minute, hour, second or individual value etc) and accordingly the UI selected for an end user changes. Further, even reaching out to time values like hours, minutes, seconds is possible now on date and date/time values respectively. To add to it, a custom relative date options are also available. So why limit options only to what the values from DB are providing.

 

There are also options of have relative date filtering options like Last 7 days, Last 30 days, Last 3 months, Next 10 days etc.

  • Formatting options: Format the data as it makes sense to you, you want to view currency symbol with the amount, you want dates to show in your local format, you want to add weeks or quarters next to the date, you want to see months in words, you want numbers should be separated by thousands value, you want them to convert to higher units when it goes to bigger values. With Helical Insight, you will never run out of options.
  • Drill Through: You can connect two reports having completely different visualizations or prepared from a different metadata to pass information between them and show the granular level of data as per your needs.


  • Cube: You can specify the hierarchy of columns to make the application understand what level of details would be interlinked and how to navigate through the drilldown. Like country name will be drilling down to states to city to area to locality, etc… Further, you can also prepare the columns with pre-applied DB functions like always show sum of amount, or average of cost, or count of ID; even though they all may be integer values, they can behave differently if used in reports. This cube also has all the calculations already done beforehand and present in in-memory, hence the performance would be blazing fast even with huge amount of data. This makes you life easier while slicing and dicing of the data and also gets you right information in your reports. This is similar to what LOD (level of details) functionality is there in Tableau.
  • Live and In-memory Data: Just like Tableau, Helical Insight allows to extract the data and do reporting on top of it (which is especially useful with huge amount of data). You can also have the option of directly running the Query on DB also. You can further define the transformations and aggregations which should get applied when a field is dragged, thus making the usage even more simpler for end users with very less technical knowledge. In-memory and cubes are built for just the same needs.
  • Dashboards: It is one of the ways to provide a single glance of all your KPIs and information at a single screen. The dashboard can have table, crosstab, visualizations, images, text, grouping etc. There are various kind of UI driven customization option for header, shadow, background color, border, alignment, layout, filtering positions and many more options
  • Collaboration and Sharing: Information generated would be meaningless if we are not able to convey the message and details to appropriate teams in timely manner. Therefore, it becomes imperative to have an inherent feature to share the dashboards and reports to right folks at the right time. Just like Tableau, Helical Insight promote collaboration. It has options of emailing not only just the charts or static image output in jpeg or pdf formats, but also email the data from which the visualization has been created in excel or csv formats.
Are you looking for Best Open Source Alternative To Tableau
Get started with Helical Insight. Helical Insight is best Alternative To Tableau

Clik Here to Free Download

Further, you can even schedule the dashboards and reports to reach you or your partners as soon as they start their work. Its inbuilt row-level security also ensure that the data is secured and viewers get to see data which they are entitled to see. This also saves your efforts in generating a single visualization or dashboard and share across the entire team or even in multiple client organizations. Data security takes care of the rest for you.

  • Data Sources: Just like Tableau, Helical Insight supports myriad data source options you can connect to and fetch data from. Be it a popular RDBMS, columnar database, NoSQL databases, or even flat files like CSV or excel worksheet. Helical Insight works well with almost all JDBC drivers and connects to any database or even data APIs for your needs. Even if the needed database might not be by default enlisted on to the application, it allows you to upload the JDBC drivers for the same. A list of most common database drivers are available on our website too for you to use.
    Helical Insight also has got some advanced options like Dynamic Switching using which you can switch the DBconnections based on the user/role/organizations
  • Advanced Visualizations: One of the features and especially the one that made Tableau popular was and always had been its wide range of visualizations. Just like Tableau, Helical Insight has a wide variety of charts including basic visualizations of Pie Chart or a Bar Chart to more advanced Heatmaps, Family tree, Pareto Charts or even map based analytics. There is also an option to embed and call any external JS visualization also within the product.
  • Robust Security & Integration: Helical Insight, just like Tableau, understands the how carefully you handle your data. It has inbuilt fool-proof security system in place which validates and authenticates and then authorize any user. You can even provide controlled access to application modules based on organizations, roles, users, profiles and much more. You can use your own authentication mechanism and authorize application via SSO. For embedding various methods are supported like iframe, webservices, object tag, embed tag. Also for SSO also various methods are supported like CAS, LDAP, Active Directory, ADFS, JWT, oAuth, oAuth 2.0, SAML, Okta etc.
    Also since Helical Insight is a completely browser based too, unlike Tableau, you can even embed the report designer or dashboard designer interface also within your product. Hence your end customers can also create their own analysis as well.
  • Mobile View: Helical Insight understands the importance of different screens and therefore its inherent responsive application design works well on smaller screens just fine. Being a browser-based application, you are not limited to use it on your desk with big screens, you do not need to install any mobile app, you can easily work while you commute on your tablet or mobiles too. All the way from application modules to the dashboards you build up, everything is responsive and you can even customize and define it as you want it to be.
  • Instant BI: Just like ‘Ask Data’ feature of Tableau, Helical Insight has Instant BI module just for you to ask in simple way what you want to the application. In turn application’s AI will gather the words, and provide you the appropriate analysis filter based on your inputs provide you an appropriate visualization that you may feel useful. Further, it also allows you to take this into ad-hoc reporting module where you can further customize it based on your needs.
Along with above key features Helical Insight comes with many other critical features that makes it the best available opensource alternative to Tableau.

  • Canned reporting support for pixel perfect, document kind of reports via canned reporting module
  • Workflow engine allowing to create a customized workflow
  • All-in-one flat pricing with free option also
  • Option of direct support and services from Helical Insight company
  • Self service Drag-and-drop interface
  • Nested sorting
  • Cross database join
  • Extensive API Supports
  • Extensible framework
  • Embedding and White labelling
  • User Management
  • Performance enhancement features caching, pagination, virtualization, load balancing, in-memory
  • Dashboard customizations
  • Community support
  • Highly Extensible with various configurable XML files, API support, code access
  • Code support with options of adding HTML, javascript, CSS, Groovy, Liquid Template Language, Java etc
  • End-customer access to your reporting tool

 

If you have any further questions, or want to see a personalized demo or a free POC you can reach out on support@helicalinsight.com

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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