Drupal vs. Jaspersoft

If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.

Incentivized

It is well suited for the fact of scalability itself and the breadth of features this application has in order to make the migration from legacy systems to the newer different versions more seamless and effective. Data integrity and security are the main aspects of this tool which does not lose their value when doing day-to-day operations for data mapping.

Incentivized

• Drag and drop functionality is easy to use
• Easy to switch between straight text and HTML content
• Ability to easily have multiple environments so that pages can be built in b/c-stage before they are approved and published
• Solid user experience where it's clear how to navigate the platform

Incentivized

• TIBCO Jaspersoft allows you to embed reports into your own application, which gives users the feeling they are using a single product.
• TIBCO Jaspersoft Studio allows for more advanced report development, such as adding subreports, drilldown to detail reports, images, page headers, page footers, maps, and more.
• TIBCO's Jaspersoft Domain Designer is very easy to use and navigate.

Incentivized

• This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
• Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
• The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.

Incentivized

• One of the issues we found during our implementation was that the reporting software would work faster for certain data sources and not the others. Extracting CSVs and XML was slower in comparison to JSON in our experience.
• Jaspersoft Studio was the main IDE we used for development. Built atop the Eclipse IDE, we found that the tool was really resource intensive and generally take long time to initialize.

Incentivized

The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

JasperSoft has been amazing. It is well documented, fast, and transparent in how it functions. We have been very confident in JasperSoft in every aspect of our business and offerings where we've used it. On top of that, their improvements to the product have been fantastic. I am really looking forward to seeing where they take their product and how we can leverage that to please our clients

Incentivized

As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

Incentivized

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

Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

We've never had an outage of the software itself. If it was unavailable, it was due to a network outage, not a problem with Jasper.

Incentivized

Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

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

I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

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

The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

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

Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

Incentivized

Having just completed an upgrade to the latest version of Jaspersoft, I am happy to say their support was very good. There were a couple of small challenges which were not easily resolved, but they were primarily related to the fact that we had skipped updates for a couple of versions. The current update procedures assumed we were upgrading from the prior latest version (6.4) to to the new version (7.1).

Incentivized

Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

Incentivized

When looking at the different features of these reporting engines, and what we were going to be using it for, the answer seemed clear. Jasper offered exactly what we were looking for, and did so for a price that we were happy with. For a scalable, feature-rich reporting engine that doesn't break the bank, Jaspersoft is the way to go.

Incentivized

Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

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

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• When we demo our Jaspersoft environment to potential clients, their eyes light up and they sit up in their chairs a bit more. A lot of our meetings have ended with with the client very interested in our product due to Jaspersoft.
• Our existing clients have been very satisfied with the adhoc features of Jaspersoft. We've been able to provide them better access to their data on their terms instead of ours. Of course this turns into a huge win for us.
• We've always used SQL Server Reporting Services to deliver our reports to our clients. Converting to Jaspersoft has allowed us to generate the reporting layer that our clients demand. They no longer feel like they are settling for what we offer.