Jaspersoft vs. Logi Symphony

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

Considering it's price point in the market, Dundas BI offers a lot of functionality. They are constantly adding features and bug fixes which is great, but also means there are always updates to take if you want everything to work as expected. The standard user interface is pretty easy to understand, but it takes a while for developers and power users to become independent of documentation.

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

• Project organization from Development to Production, you get a production and development license but I think the best way to do it is with DEV and Prod project in the Production box. Use the development box for testing updates and really crazy things. With the Dev and Prod projects on the same box, you just publish from Dev to Prod and you are done. Users only have access to the Prod projects so no one can mess up what you are working on.
• Security - If you have a hierarchy (subsidiaries, divisions, department, teams) and you want each group to see only their data, then Security hierarchies are for you!
• Dependent filters! What's this you ask? Here is an example of how it can be used, in your company you have departments and who works for what department is in your database. You make a dashboard that has a department filter (only show these departments), a managers filter, and employee filter. Not every manager or employee is in multiple departments usually only one. With dependent filters you can say that the manager and employee filter are dependent on what is selected in the departments filter so when you go to filter them they only show the managers or employees that are part of that department, and you can even it do so employees are not only dependent on department but on manager as well. Then it gets even better as it can be done in reverse as well so when you select a manager then go to the department it only shows the departments he works for (there are better situations where this is more useful).
• It is scriptable! From calculate columns, null replacements, button actions, load actions, hover over events there a way to do what you want.
• They are constantly improving and listens to your suggestions.

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

• Not too many cons for how we use the application. It really is easy and powerful. Very powerful.
• Licensing is one thing that could be looked into. It is simple, but a little confusing. For example, if I get a license today, but a new release comes out tomorrow, it seems that the license doesn't work with the new release. Maybe that is by design, but it would be nice to clearly understand.

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.

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

We are still in the implementation phase, but so far we are finding it to be easy to use and learn. The eLearning courses that they have made available for free, as well as User Forums and other training videos have made even difficult concepts easier to understand.

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

We have bi-weekly calls with our Success Manager, as well as access to support as needed. Any question that I have had, multiple people have been willing and able to jump on a call to talk me through it, or send an email with the solution

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

Providing that you have the client's needs well known, creating BI content using Dundas BI is a walk in the park!

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

We have tested Tableau prior to Dundas BI and though Tableau is a great package in itself, Dundas BI is much more cost-effective for our needs and requirements and hence zeroed in on Dundas BI. We have also tried microstrategy but it has a very dated UI and doesn't suit our needs in today's more modern world

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

• Coming from an SQL based standard delivery model, Dundas BI has provided a fantastic rate of ROI.
• The preparation and delivery time has reduced from weeks to just a few hours.

Incentivized