Tableau vs Jaspersoft

JasperSoft is one of the top Open Source BI tools in the market (Pentaho is another tool positioned in the same space), finding a place in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant over the last few years. JasperSoft provides a comprehensive BI platform. The JasperSoft Enterprise Edition has a reporting server, ad hoc query, in-memory analysis, dashboarding, a reports library, OLAP and ETL. Due to its embeddable architecture and relaxed GNU General Public License terms and conditions, JasperSoft earns more than half of its business from OEMs, SaaS providers and other companies that integrate JasperSoft into their software offerings or internal applications.

Tableau, though not Open Source, is the undisputed leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and is loved by business users / dashboard consumers across the globe for its visualization capabilities.  In this respect, a head-to-head between these JasperSoft and Tableau might seem like an apples and oranges comparison – but we find more and more existing and potential clients approaching us with the same! It ties back to my previous point that large scale implementation of traditional enterprise BI is expensive for SMBs – presently, both Tableau and JasperSoft offer relatively low TCO (for small implementations / no. of consumers) and are hence mentioned together. So let’s get cracking:

	JasperSoft	Tableau
COST	JasperSoft Professional: 4 Core Single Instance & Unlimited Users – Premium Support 37500USD/year, Standard Support 29000USD/year Additional cores added in multiples of 2 – 5500USDx2/year Generally, 1 core handles 10-12 heavy (ad-hoc slice & dice), 30-50 light (business users viewing static reports) users Cloud: Jaspersoft for AWS - 0.40USD/hour (AWS costs 13 cents – so total of 0.53USD/hour or roughly 3700USD/year) + 1500USD/month or 7000USD/year for phone support)	Tableau Desktop: 2000USD/user (perpetual license) Tableau Server: 1000USD/user (perpetual license) + 20% maintenance/year + requires additional Desktop licenses for development Cloud: Tableau Online - 500USD/25 users/year + at least 1 Tableau Desktop Professional @ 2000USD/user
TALENT	Have to identify 3rd party resources that can help you with implementation and future projects – talent pool is limited though. Technical resources required with at least basic understanding of J2EE Web Application functionality and maintenance design.	Anyone is a potential basic Tableau user; but more advanced users are not easy to come by.
VENDOR SUPPORT	The community is helpful .Mixed reviews about support though – while some have complained about bad support with no solution offered, others have vouched for its superior support. Might have to do with support contract. “The service has been at such a level that even if we did not require the Enterprise solution to fit our needs, the support alone would be worth the cost.” – Satisfied Customer	Tableau support is great. The community is helpful as well.
EASE OF USE	Install isn’t point & click – some effort involved in server setup, maintenance and report generation – both, time and money if tech support is solicited. The GUI can be made more intuitive, and it would be helpful to have more tutorials.	Very easy to install and quickly begin deriving insights – even for non-technical users. GUI extremely easy to use and numerous tutorials are available on the web.
STABILITY	Many bugs reported – while JasperSoft has made improvements in catching certain errors some users have reported seeing Java error dumps occasionally.	Mostly error free – unstable features are turned off immediately and helpful error messages displayed generally.
APPLICATION INTEGRATION	Integration into applications is great (especially Java apps)	- same as above -
WEB PORTAL INTEGRATION	Great! Though still not a flawless process -may require custom Java code to work.	Easy and error-free.
EMBEDDED INSIGHTS	USP of JasperSoft – the server product is easily configurable with company UI and can be deployed across webpages, portals and applications with absolutely no user limitations.	You can embed views from Tableau Server across webpages, portals and applications. These follow the same licensing and permission restrictions used on the server. Generally, people loading a webpage with an embedded view must also have an account on Tableau Server. If you have a core-based license you can alternatively select Enable Guest, which allows users to load the view without logging in.
ETL	Uses open source Talend Studio for ETL - unintuitive but powerful tool - Talend is a code generator, so Jobs are translated into corresponding defined language (Java or Perl), compiled and executed .It is necessary to have an expert in Java or Perl to take full advantage of the tool.	No ETL functionality, some basic SQL and nifty connectors to various data source, traditional and Big.
OLAP	The Mondrian OLAP Work Bench is a great tool for designing and deploying OLAP cubes for multi-dimensional analysis. However, users do encounter occasional glitches and need to find workarounds to meet a defined business requirement.	This form of multi-dimensional modelling is completely absent in Tableau, replaced by optimized columnar storage or Extracts - Tableau does connect to OLAP DBs though.
VISUALIZATION & DASHBOARDING	While many of the advanced report writing features are available through the GUI, customization may require knowledge of Java. Also, the client GUI tools are not as friendly as they could be.	Report / Dashboard building is a breeze - Beautiful reports with great design embedded, dashboards with filters easily set up
AD-HOC SLICE & DICE	Ad-hoc reporting does not work for everyone, can still be quite technical for non-technical users.	Ad-Hoc reporting is a breeze.
EXPORTING REPORTS	Allows Pixel Perfect Reporting and exporting reports in various formats, including PDF, Excel, Excel with pagination, CSV, DOCX, RTF, Flash, ODT, ODS, Excel 2007, and Excel 2007 with pagination.	Not as comprehensive - You can export views and data in the as Image / PDF file, Microsoft Access data, Crosstab to Microsoft Excel, and Tableau packaged workbook
SOFTWARE UPGRADES	JasperSoft releases new software versions relatively often and the upgrade process is relatively unintuitive. Users have mentioned issues going between versions of Jasper Reports.	Tableau makes it a point to ensure the process is hassle-free with minimum disruptions that are well documented. However, certain rework of workbooks is may be necessary to replace features that have been edited/removed.

Among other things, the 2013 Gartner BI Report states the following about Tableau and JasperSoft:

Tableau: Tableau’s user counts grew by 75% from last year, but the platform is still largely departmentally deployed, albeit across multiple departments, with just below the survey average for user deployment size. Tableau’s products often fill an unmet need in large organizations that already have a BI standard, which makes them frequently deployed as a complementary capability to an existing BI platform. As a result, Tableau is still less likely to be considered an enterprise BI standard than the products of most other vendors. Given the success of Tableau and other interactive visualization vendors, leading traditional BI platform vendors – including Microsoft, MicroStrategy, IBM and SAP – delivered their own data discovery capabilities in 2012, mostly in the image of Tableau’s functionality, and are integrating and bundling data discovery capabilities with their BI and analytic platforms for free, or at a low cost, to proactively meet their customers’ business user ease-of-use requirements – and, more importantly, to defend their installed bases from the adoption and expansion of Tableau and the other data discovery vendors.

JasperSoft: JasperSoft earned below-average scores for ease of use for end users and developers. Despite these results, JasperSoft customers still report below-average BI platform ownership costs. Moreover, its customers maintain a positive view of the vendor’s future, and report successes with JasperSoft’s product (as defined by expanded usage) over the past year. One explanation for this paradox is that the value organizations derive from JasperSoft’s lower cost deployments is in line with their level of investment and expectations.

A final word about JasperSoft though – while JasperSoft’s price differentiation is important, it has also consistently experimented with product and service innovation, the latest example being JasperSoft for AWS, a cloud analytics server available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, which you can buy by the hour, paying only for what you use. Its recent acquisition by TIBCO may well be the first step towards Open Source BI’s future dominance.