Devart Excel Add-ins vs. Excel4apps vs. OpenText Magellan

Devart Excel Add-ins is really good for data comparison of one database table against another database table. There are plenty of times where the business users need help understanding with their Power BI data models are not connecting correctly and I use this tool to break down the differences between the tables they are trying to connect.

Incentivized

We have to calculate most all Lab / Pilot / Proposals sizing and results. The automated calculations in [Excel4apps] is awesome, as once you are familiar with them, it is easy to quickly implement them when needed.

Incentivized

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

• Devart Excel Add-in supports connectivity with various databases - which really helps to customize and massage data.
• Since data is available in cloud, it is easily accessible everywhere.
• It can also be integrated with SSIS components making it possible to resolve complex problems.

Incentivized

• Easy to install and maintain. After the initial installation, there is little involvement by the technical administrators.
• Cloning production to a test environment does not require any additional setups unlike Oracle EBS which does.
• Loading data and reporting on this data is handled via EXCEL spreadsheets which is the "language" of our financial users.

Incentivized

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

• The data pump feature breaks sometimes
• The profile usage monitoring is slow
• The event profiler is delayed

Incentivized

• It is possible but difficult to retrieve data or set criteria from different module into a single report or retrieve. If it is more user friendly instead of having to create a complex formula to retrieve the data, this function will be utilized more often.
• It will be nice to have visual (graphs, etc.) report template available
• It is helpful if we can retrieve data for a range of date, instead of just YTD, PTD etc. and multi-year data all at once for comparison too.

Incentivized

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

I am not a power user of Excel. So I find Exel4apps a friendlier version of the things that I could do on Excel and making it easier with a magic wand.

Incentivized

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

I have not needed support yet

Incentivized

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

Devart Excel stacks up very well against its alternatives. It has significant advantages as it keeps getting an update. Features are very much suitable for smaller organizations. For larger organizations the features cannot be used directly because of the size of the company and more native requirements of IT software requirements.

Incentivized

Excel4apps is more user friendly and can retrieve data much easier and in a nicer format than Jaspersoft. Qlik Sense is useful and have more visual reporting and dashboard. However, it is usually used for higher level of analyses and review. Yardi is used for specific purpose, which is different than Excel4apps. Excel4apps can pull all the financial data from Oracle, including billing and collections.

Incentivized

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

• The data compare option saves our dev team a lot of time
• The documenter feature is nice to use for explaining table definitions
• The event profiler is great for usage metrics

Incentivized

• Increase team transparency
• Increased reporting

Incentivized

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.