Jaspersoft vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

TIBCO Jaspersoft is well suited for users who are not too technical. These users are able to easily drag and drop domain fields from their database to create friendly table reports. Users can easily add filters to their reports which allows for reusability. On the other hand, if a user is looking to add information that has many-to-many relationships, duplicates will appear. Having duplicates in an ad-hoc view and not being able to easily remove them is a big issue for many of our clients.

Incentivized

The Microsoft BI suite of tools, which comprises tools from the SQL Server suite, provides end-to-end features and functionality for businesses of any size. Users who need dashboards and reports fast will benefit from this tool. It’s simple to connect to databases, cloud storage systems, and CSV files of any type. This makes the dashboards suitable for a more rapid presentation workflow because we can easily incorporate them into PowerPoint presentations. Enterprise and standard editions are both available for some tools.

Incentivized

• Jaspersoft has an excellent self-service module that allows ad hoc report creation and can be easily worked by non-technical users as well.
• Using this tool, it doesn't matter if you are viewing the report on a desktop screen or smaller mobile screens, the experience is seamless.

Incentivized

• The layout of Power BI is very intuitive. Someone that is familiar with Excel and working with Charts and Graphs in that environment will find the learning curve a rather short one to start using Power BI.
• I like the way Power BI fits an assortment of users and how the functionality that you engage is replicated in Excel, that being Power Query and Power Pivot. So what you learn in one tool can be readily applied towards the other which allows you to more effectively apply your training.
• I appreciate how Microsoft is working to develop tools that go a long ways to empowering the end user. Prior to Power BI I would have had to consult with a "BI" professional to develop a dashboard. With Power BI I don't have to consult with anyone, I can work to put together the dash board I want and using a tool set that is really robust and allows me to engage an enormous amount of data. It's provides a great deal of flexibility and the types of data I can connect to.
• Updates...Microsoft is working diligently to keep Power BI current with monthly updates. They do a really good job of listening to the end user, if there is functionality not currently present just give them a month or so.
• Just to be clear, even though it's easy to get going right out of the gate with Power BI it provides plenty of opportunities to create some really sophisticated reporting solutions. With DAX in Power Pivot and M language in Power Query, you are provided with plenty of head room to do some really amazing things in Power BI.
• Training...there are resources across the web for learning and growing your skills and Power BI. And what's even better is the majority of those resources are free.
• Data engagement, when presenting the data to the end user Power BI goes a long way to allowing that end user to engage the data and begin to identify root cause by simply interacting with the graph/chart/data set. It allows for really fluid engagement. Prior to Power BI so many times during the presentation of data we often times ended the engagement with that data with more questions than what were answered. With Power BI, more often than not, the end user is able to get answers to the questions by simply clicking on the data in the graph/chart/dataset to see the details. This tool really does have the capacity to make you look like a rock star.

Incentivized

• The UI on the report designer, Jaspersoft Studio, looks a little outdated. I think that Studio as a whole could use a facelift. Additionally, Jaspersoft Studio tends to slow down over time, requiring a restart of the program.
• There is a bit of a learning curve with all of the intricacies of Jaspersoft Studio, it's kind of overwhelming when trying to learn it from nothing.
• One functionality that seems to be missing, that would help our use-case, would be the ability to parameterize a JSON URL as a data source. For example, if there was a call to a set of JSON data, it has to be a static URL. But in many cases, APIs that return JSON take parameters via the URL. Jaspersoft does not support that.

Incentivized

• The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category.
• Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups.
• Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI.

Incentivized

We've converted our library of reports to use Jaspersoft. Our clients have had a taste of Jaspersoft and we've had very positive feedback from those interactions. Our internal employees have had great success using iReports and JasperStudio to create very robust reports that better show the data our clients expect to see. Overall, our experiences with Jaspersoft have been great and it's proven to be a very good decision for the direction of our business.

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

I think it's a tool well suited for a software developer. Others with less coding skills could struggle somewhat with the tool. I find java a little unforgiving as a language for expressions and not very user friendly for the technically dis-inclined. Sometimes the numeric conversions cause issues (who knew that 0 and 0.0 would cause different things to happen). Previous experience with a reporting tool that used visual basic for its' expressions that I found much simpler to use. On the other hand, java is so widespread, you can easily google the syntax to accomplish what you need to do.

Incentivized

Usability is great. This product will make most feel right at home. I feel like this question should be asked from two points of view: 1. Creator of reports, Data Models, Views etc: Most Advanced users will still rate the usability as very high. Its capabilities are still robust. However when compared to other Enterprise Class products it will not do many of the advanced application queries. 2. End user, Consumer: All end users will feel right at home. Many will be able to create connections to already created data models and other external publicly available sources like twitter, Facebook, World Health order etc... These connections are then in turn very very easily available to publish to SharePoint and Power BI. It took me a while to understand what I think is Microsoft's strategy. This will handle all but the most of robust needs. Much like many American made cars and my favorite Corvette, Microsoft is fast, has it own break downs from time to time but all of these are really to tolerate when the price is considered and the next one up that can out perform it is three to four times as much money makes this an easy one to still recommend

There have been a few instances where Tomcat has consumed 100% CPU, which requires a restart to resolve, but other than that reliability has been excellent.

Incentivized

Reports are stable and always avaiable when needed.

Complex reports on heavy data load may take considerable amount of time. We have experinced some latencies/misfires regarding to this.

Incentivized

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

They have a great customer support ticketing system in which they always respond same-day. They offer conference calls with srcreensharing as well in order to better understand your issues.

I wish that the lower level support access came with more than just 12 cases per year though as this makes us less likely to reach out for questions on things that we then instead try to solve ourselves which results in loss of time in trying to acquire new features and or solve a problem.

Incentivized

While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.

It did the job of getting us to our deadline we set for ourselves for initial launch. The customer we launched the product for was also there to learn about it at the same in order to better understand the capabilities. This helped greatly so that the customer was on the same page on what was possible when using jaspersoft. I think most people would not want their customers aware the product they are using is third-party but in this case it was a new experience for us both and so as we learned more about jaspersoft, we both had better communication on what the future road map was for their business needs in BI.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

Resources available in the TIBCO Knowledge Base are covering almost everything. They are well organized, and covering almost every possibility. There is always the change to get back to the TIBCO support or to the dedicated Customer Success Manager whenever something very specific or bound to a customization is not covered.

Incentivized

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

Super easy to install and/or upgrade! For all the big name software out there that does some business critical things, Jasper is a pleasure to install and/or upgrade. The bundled installer is all ONE install (one shell script execution at least) that sets up everything. Vastly superior to most other software of this caliber.

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

TIBCO does a better job in providing seamless data mapping and migration from one legacy system to other without any loss of traffic or compromising the security of the data. Whereas with another tool sometimes because of the integral framework there may be some questions as to why the data packets were lost during mapping and migration.

Incentivized

MSBI for my company is a like using a car that has a good balance of features, is easy to use, has good support, and works well with other things or requirement you may have. We specifically chose it because it is one of the promising platform whose support team will never let us down. Plus all the features of MSBI are A1 and productive according to my team's analysis.

We haven't really started to explore the scalability of the product as yet, but in terms of existing deployments it has done what we need it to do.

Incentivized

• I used the free version, so obviously the positive side is we did not have to pay
• Next advantage is you can pick it up relatively fast, even though I think the UI can be much improved. Otherwise creating PDF reports by programming is quite a complicate task, to me anyway

• As it came "in the box" with necessary SQL Server RDBMS purchases, the ROI for the BI components are high as there was no incremental cost.
• Has provided standard reporting for most of the organization available via highly formatted PDF or Excel versions.
• Has provided ad-hoc analytics using SSAS in conjunction with Excel.

Incentivized