What is free-ware (or just cheaper) analog to Tableau (ad-hoc BI)?

Question

I need an ability to connect to different sources (minimum MS SQL and Excel) and EASILY create ad-hoq reports, on the fly. What is the solution for this, apart from Tableau (http://www.tableausoftware.com/)?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Egor,

I think you could consider GoodData (www.gooddata.com) - a cloud business intelligence solution. It's not free but definitely cheaper than Tableau, especially if you want to enable multiple users to create ad hoc reports.

GoodData enables you to create remote projects (= cloud based data marts) and provides a convenient user interface to instantly create or edit ad hoc reports or to organize reports into dashboards.

You can use the GoodData command line tool to connect to existing data sources and load them into your GoodData project, see http://developer.gooddata.com/gooddata-cl/ for details or let me know if you'd need any help to set up your project.

Quick disclaimer: I work at GoodData and I've written some parts of the CL tool mentioned above.

Pavel