BIRT vs Jasper Reports

Question

Hi,

I goggled for 2 hours to find what shall I use.

I found that both are good and have good community. BIRT is supported by IBM, IBM integrated Tivoli reports with it. This proves it is good and will keep growing.

Jasper Reports has fairly bid community and (probably) a better report designed (iReport).

My requirement is simple: I want to use quick, good reporting tool. My reporting requirements may keep on increasing, thus would like a tool which remains upto-the-mark with market.

Please suggest.

Sandeep Jindal

Answer 1

BIRT is the only reporting tool that is part of the Eclipse foundation. That alone is enough for me. The IDE is easy-to-use and you can design reports using a really intuative WYSIWYG designer. When things get more complex, you have the APIs and scripting hooks to handle it. After you design the report itself, you have a ton of deployment flexbility. Browsers all the way to a native iPhone client.

My short list of reasons I would go with BIRT:

1. Data agnostic designer: JDBC, Native Drivers, Web Services, POJOs
2. Eclipse-based: The community in and around BIRT & Eclipse is thriving.
3. Drag-andDrop report creation: No programming is required to create content
4. Versatility: You can create all kinds of content with BIRT, not just traditonal BI. Have a look at the BIRT Exchange DevShare to get a feel for how much cool stuff is out there.
5. Easy to deploy: Eihter embedded in an application or stand-alone
6. Once executed and built, BIRT Report Documents are stand-alone entities. This really increases deployment options since you no longer need access to source data and resources for the users to view the report. Gets around firewall issues, security problems, etc... Really flexible execution.

Good luck no matter which way you go!

P.S. I did leave off one huge feature, and that is Page Level Security. If you want to develop one large report for a differentiated audience, you can do that in BIRT and rely on the tool to distribute the proper pages to the appropriate users. This can be a HUGE savings in resources (i.e. not generating 100 separate reports, but rather generating one report and slicing it up as many times as you need).

Answer 2

I realize that this is not too current, but my company has recently completed a comparison between BIRT, Jasper and Pentaho. If you are still interested, please visit the Innovent Solutions web site to view the comparison.