Jaspersoft Reporting and Analytics for AWS

I explored Jaspersoft  as part of my experience while looking into my current work schedules and was eager to explore new technologies and tools to understand what capabilities they could bring into our current initiatives we were taking on in the projects or maybe the new innovations.

Jaspersoft  is definitely useful for generating customizable reports on your application itself instead of redirecting the users to some other third-party tool. So for generating the reports, it is definitely a very good platform.

This was basically part of my initial self-analysis and exploration that I was conducting. I generated a couple of reports on how frequently the user traffic was coming, some reports regarding the claim success rate, claim rejection rate, and also the count of the users that were landing on a particular page, how much traffic was coming, and how frequently they were shifting to the other or navigating to the other pages inside the applications. I also generated graphical reports as well. If someone is looking for generating lucrative reports that are pixel perfect along with graphs, it is really helpful.

If someone is looking for it, the kind of perfection Jaspersoft is bringing in is a real example and exploration for the end users. The report structure, the look and feel, the scheduling, the deep embedding, and also the precision that it brings to your report really matter a lot. For example, even if we are trying to generate a heat map or a bubble chart or normally a pivot graph, it helped a lot.

There are definitely lots of features. If you just use it and even if you want a playground for data sciences to explore the trends, you might look elsewhere, but Jaspersoft is definitely bringing a good perspective in terms of making a precision report with pixel-perfect quality. Most of the BI tools have flaws with data dynamically, which breaks a strict layout, but Jaspersoft Studio gave us absolute control over the horizontal and the vertical coordinates, the X and Y axis, ensuring the PDF output looked identically similar every time. The deep embedding feature is also valuable. For example, with the real-world explanation and visualizing the D3.js  code that was integrated on Jaspersoft dashboard itself on their SaaS platform, the users never even knew that they were looking at a third-party tool. If you embedded Jaspersoft into your application, it just seems like the reporting is part of your application and you are not navigating to some other external third-party tool. We also use a server to automate the weekly report generation, and in that case, it is really helpful.

Since I explored it as a part of my self-exploration of the different technologies, it brings a lot of positive aspects and bringing the reports on the table with respect to the matrices or the criteria I was looking for, even above the expectations. Though I agree it takes time to get the reports done and needs some hands-on experience on that, but the quality it is bringing and it is not creating any kind of deviation for the user. The end user should not feel that they are navigating to some third-party site or the other platform. It is embedded in your application on its own to have a seamless experience throughout the entire journey.

Every platform has its own way of working and definitely there is always a room for improvement. Jaspersoft is the same. I find that there is a good space on the learning curve, which can be decreased with proper documentation because if someone is a seasoned developer or a seasoned professional, it is easy to have the knowledge and the kind of reports they want to bring with Jaspersoft, but if some new learners or newbies are there, then definitely there is a learning curve on this. Additionally, on the licensing side there is a commercial and the enterprise license. You need to see which one suits you better and should not overpay it unnecessarily if it is not needed. The documentation gap is also there, so I would still recommend that the documentation can be much more emphasized, standardized, and have something specifically about the integration on the coding side, like how you should need to configure the things. That is where the documentation can be enhanced.

I would say maybe on the performance and support size because if you are running it on the server, sometime the UI might or the report may take some time to refresh data or get a delayed response, and that is where things can be improved. If someone is looking for a seamless experience, they can definitely go for Jaspersoft. But if they are looking for a quick building of the report with drag and drop facilities, then there are some other tools for the report generations, quite easily. They can opt for that instead.

For Jaspersoft, scalability is where it definitely shines in. We were working on different multiple reports against a data set over thousands or hundreds of records. By using its JSON data integration, it was easier to get all the data ingestion on the server-side filtering, then the performance remains stable even under the heavy load. It is really good.

As I mentioned, the licensing part is important with the enterprise and the community license. You need to see which one suits you better. Additionally, on the speed side, if you are running it on a server side, you need to see and balance the load accordingly so that the refresh rate should be high and should not have a delayed response. That is another point. One of the more core points would be the documentation gaps. The user interface that can be enhanced because currently Jaspersoft Studio feels like a bit using a tool from an early 2005 or 2010 version. With respect to the newer generation or the current era, the UI needs to be enhanced and the user experience should disrupt the other competitors in the market. That is where the improvement can be done.

I have been in my current field for more than eight plus years.

Scalability is where Jaspersoft definitely shines in. We were working on different multiple reports against a data set over thousands or hundreds of records. By using its JSON data integration, it was easier to get all the data ingestion on the server-side filtering, and then the performance remains stable even under the heavy load.

Customer support is really good on the community side. It just needs the documentation part and then it is good.

I did not switch. It was just a part of additional exploration and we were using Power BI and Tableau as well in multiple projects for the reporting and analysis.

I would not say it is easy to set up because definitely there is a learning curve if someone is going with Jaspersoft because it has the Visual Studio, XML integration. You need to have a good hands-on experience on your Java side and the XML side.

Somewhat, but not significantly. The reason is that it depends on the use case you are working upon. If you have a massive client with a good budget on your side, you can definitely go for Jaspersoft that brings the pixel-perfect in-house application, in-built integration with a seamless experience, that provide a good user experience to the user. Then definitely you can invest and it can increase your ROI. But on the counterpart, if you are looking for something that have much more lucrative UI features on reporting, then you can opt for the other tools as well.

Pricing again depends upon the needs and how you want to go for it. For example, one should definitely check before committing a full enterprise license and leverage Jaspersoft community edition. It shares some of the core engine capabilities as a paid version, allowing someone to test most of your complex report functionalities. If you want to run some kind of JS code or the XML or the SQL queries, you can check it out. Lay out your requirements and your vision or the innovations with upfront cost. Then if you think lesser cost is fine, you can go with the lower version. If you want the enterprise license, then you can definitely look into that.

I would be giving two pieces of advice. For example, if your needs are basically to generate pixel-perfect reporting with the precision on the values and the scaling it is going to bring, you can go for Jaspersoft. If you need deep embedding, if you want to visualize your JS, XML, or Java code with the heavy load of data sets you want to ingest it, you can use the data integration capabilities and the filtering capabilities of Jaspersoft. It will easily get in your data and can generate the reports on different sectors, wide range of reporting as per your needs and requirement. On the counter side, if you are looking for something that basically does not require the investment in time that working with Jaspersoft will definitely going to require, and if you do not have a seasoned developer on that side, you can go with other tools as well, such as Power BI and Tableau that can generate the reports pretty much quickly and give you a flexibility to integrate the third-party tools and then navigate your application over there or design a dashboard separately. My overall rating for this product is 7 out of 10.