Jaspersoft vs. SAS Visual Analytics

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

SAS Business Intelligence is more suited to organizations which are already using SAS as the primary software for their analytics needs. Learning curve is relatively shorter for teams already skilled in BASE SAS. For organizations already working with open source software like Julia and Python, it doesn't make much sense to use SAS BI.

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

• SAS BI makes it very easy to create interactive dashboards even for someone who is not from an IT background. For some specific requirements, basic knowledge of SQL is good enough.
• A lot of functions have been predefined which makes it very convenient to create dashboards and reports. One doesn't need to be from an IT or a programming background to understand and create dashboards.
• It supports other programming languages like R and also has a seamless API integration with various data management platforms.

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• The UI on the report designer, Jaspersoft Studio, looks a little outdated.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

• Business Objects should provide a more consistent mobile/desktop interface so operation between the two is seamless
• Business Objects needs to make it easier to query across disparate data sets such as Oracle to SQL to Mongo DB
• Our installation of Business Objects does not natively allow the export of XLSX documents, only XLS

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.

There is no other product that can match SAS. There are some products that can compare to ETL but lack the analytics that SAS has. Others can perform a limited set of analytical procedures but lack the data processing that comes with SAS. Using thin client allows users to access data whenever they have an internet connection.

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

SAS BI is good for creating reports and dashboards and then sharing it with the users. It also has ability to manage access to the reports and dashboards but somehow with most of the world moving to open source languages R, Python and Julia, SAS BI feels to be archaic in terms of feature set and integrations it allow[s]. Also, comparing it with other Business Intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft BI, the functionality of SAS BI is very limited and doesn't justify the pricing.

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

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

When you call tech support, you are immediately routed to a person who can answer your question. Often they can answer on the spot. However, if they cannot, you are given a track number and then followed up with. There have been times when I have had multiple track numbers open and they will actually TRACK YOU DOWN to ensure that your problem has been resolved. Issues do not fall into black holes with SAS. They are also willing to do a WebEx with you to diagnose the problem by seeing your environment, which is always helpful.

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

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

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

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

I have chosen SAS Visual Analytics because one of my colleagues suggests using the software for the same for our work. As earlier, we use to take a lot of time in analyzing the data but after using the SAS Visual Analytics software our work has improved and time has decreased. It's very helpful for us.

Incentivized

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

• SAS Visual Analytics licensing cost should be reduced to enable users to use it in mass scale.
• More statistical and mathematical equations and theories should be converted into SAS functions for reusing.
• Because of enriched ETL and reporting capabilities SAS Visual Analytics is most preferred by business users.

Incentivized