Jaspersoft CE v/s Jaspersoft EE





Jaspersoft is world’s leading Open source BI software with more than 1.75 million download and usage. It comes in two variants, one is the community edition which is free and the other is the enterprise edition. Via this blog, we would try to understand the differences between the CE and EE. Also, we will make an attempt to understand and have Jaspersoft Enterprise Edition functionality in Jaspersoft Community Edition. Many a times, customers (esp startups and SMEs) dont have the budget or requirement to go for a full license, but they want full functionality which are present in EE, for them we have also discussed possible way outs as well.

a) Report Designer: Jaspersoft is known for its pixel perfect reports. This is created by iReport designer (free and open source). This tool helps in creation of complex reports with charts, graphs, tabular data, cross tabs, images etc. These reports can further be downloaded in different formats.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

b) Adhoc Report designer: Very beneficial for Business user, it gives a pivot kind of functionality, thus an end user can himself drag and drop the fields and create his own report on the fly. He can see this report as either a tabular data, or visualize it in different formats, save this and download this.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: In order to use adhoc reporting feature in Jaspersoft Community edition (CE), we can use a best of breed kind of solution. We can use Pentaho SAIKU plugin (its free), using this plugin for adhoc reporting, we can call it inside liferay and have adhoc reporting functionality in Jaspersoft as well.

c) Reporting Engine: Jasper reporting engine which is java based is again free and open source. It can fetch data from any kind of data source and provide picture perfect reports which can be seen, download (in different formats), printed.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

d) Dashboards: A dashboard can be a mix and match of reports, data visualizations, web APIs data, interactive parameters etc. Dashboard functionality is present only in the Jaspersoft EE

Availability:  Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: For implementing dashboard inside Jaspersoft Community Edition (Jaspersoft CE), we will have to go ahead with a best of breed solution. What we can do is for dashboards, we can use Pentaho CDE and CDF components. For representation of that, we can either use liferay or Alfresco.
Another alternative is we can call multiple instances of ireports inside liferay, thus creating a dashboard. For this a portlet has to be developed in liferay.

e) Interactive report viewing: This lets user to see the columns and perform functions like filter, arrange, sort etc.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

f) In-memory analysis: In memory basically helps in analyzing, seeing reports dashboards analysis etc on real-time and at a very high speed because it directly dumps all the information in its in-memory and doesn’t access db again and again for any requirement. This results in very high speed and throughput.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: Again, to implement In-memory analytics in Jaspersoft Community edition, we will have to use a best of breed solution. We can go with the Pentaho SAIKU plugin (which is free of cost) and liferay usage for representation

g) Server Repository: Place to store reports, dashboards, views, mashups, analytics, user profiles etc.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

h) Report Scheduling / Report Bursting: Email scheduling of the reports (could be time or trigger based).

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

i) Support: Jaspersoft is having multiple level of supports like standard support, premium support but it is only available to enterprise edition customers.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: Jaspersoft CE customer, can either will entirely depend on community support or they can come to companies like us (Helical IT Solutions), which have expertise on Jaspersoft and can help out on all the issues.


j) Mobile Business Intelligence: – Native app supporting iOS and Android platform. Touch-based browser support for iPad. iOS and Android SDK for embedding BI in native mobile app.
Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

k) Metadata Layer: Metadata basically means data about data content. Via metadata layer, we create another layer containing information about the database, hence thus implementing data level security.

Availability:    Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: For implementing metadata layer in Jaspersoft CE, what we can do is we can use OLAP server (which is present in CE – community edition) to design metadata layer along with implementing role and user based security.

l) User access to reports/dashboards and other things: This facility is again present in both the versions of Jaspersoft.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

m) Data Virtualization: This basically means integrating multiple data sources into a metadata view, and then doing BI work on it. This step reduces the work this involved in ETL.

Availability:  Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

 Alternatives: The entire work of data virtualization can be done by writing ETL jobs and stored procedures. For ETL, Talend or Kettle either of the tool can be used.
n) Data Integration (ETL): ETL stands for extract transform and load. Extract means extracting data from different dbs (big data, columnary databases, graphical databases etc), web APIs etc. After extracting, transform the same according to the business rules and finally load it into the target system which could be a database, data warehouse, data mart etc. Jaspersoft has ETL tool by the name of Talend (also known as Jasper ETL).

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

o) Interactive Visualizations: This basically means very interactive HTML5 charts with animations, hover information, interactivity in terms of selection, zoom in zoom out, interactive legends etc.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: These kind of interactive visualizations are not present in Jaspersoft community edition. For enabling that, what can be done is we can design plugin designed like jcharts and openflash (for openflash plugins are already available). One of the very famous example is Pentaho Community edition having interactive charts by CCC components (community chart components). We can also use CCC and thus have best of breed solution.

p) OLAP Server: OLAP (online analytical processing) helps in analyzing large amount of data using querying, visualizations, multi lever analysis, slice and dice, filtering etc. OLAP helps users to understand multi-dimensional data from multiple-view point. It consists of mainly three functions – consolidation, drill down, slicing & dicing.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: Yes
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

q) Multi-tenancy: This allows single instance support multiple customers, with each customer having his own userid password.

Availability: Jaspersoft CE: No
Jaspersoft EE: Yes

Alternatives: Multi-tenancy can be implemented in Jaspersoft Community Edition (CE) using Liferay portlet.

r) License: Jaspersoft CE has General public license whereas the license is having commercial license. Hence, if a client is Jaspersoft EE client, he does not need to open up his source code to the public, which is not the case with Jaspersoft CE clients.


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