Reviewing Open-Source Business Intelligence Tools
This article is an overview of some top open-source Business Intelligence (BI) and reporting tools. These tools are built to simplify planning, analysis, and reporting with one software suite. The list consists mostly of BI software that doesn’t require coding to set up and configure.
Open-source BI allows businesses to install the core platform on any system in their environment for free. Hundreds of developers are continuously improving and expanding these products. You can benefit from regular updates, or even customize BI software by modifying or extending source code to meet your company’s specific needs.
Metabase is an open-source reporting tool that offers an easy way for everyone in the company to ask questions and learn from data without knowing SQL. It has rich dashboards with auto refresh and a full screen to create, organize, and share collections of data. Experienced analysts can use SQL Mode for digging into the more complicated stuff.
With Metabase, you can create segments and metrics, filter and group your data, and explore connections between metrics. It also allows you to view data in Slack with MetaBot and schedule with Pulses.
AirBNB Superset is a Business Intelligence web application to explore and visualize data. Interactive dashboards are just the starting point in going deeper with analysis — you can drill down and dice underlying datasets. SQL editor/IDE exposes a rich metadata browser and an easy workflow to work with data.
Superset works neatly with all modern SQL-speaking databases and integrates with Druid to provide interactive and fast access to real-time datasets. You can also define how data sources are shown to the user by choosing dimensions and metrics.
Pentaho’s BI platform allows users to access and discover business data using advanced analytics tools, from basic reports to predictive modeling. With this open-source BI, users can help themselves work with data using multidimensional analysis for SQL without additional IT infrastructure. This approach is called Relational OLAP or ROLAP.
You can build a powerful Business Intelligence solution based on Mondrian as your Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) engine. It brings a multidimensional query language and allows the system to respond to queries super fast even if you have large quantities of data.
Using the Saiku Analytics plugin on top of that, you can access data with an easy graphical interface. No need to copy around jar-files in shady sub-folders and edit obscure configuration files.
SpagoBI is the open-source Business Intelligence solution to monitor your business data and customize your real-time analytics. It offers a wide range of analytical tools, such as reporting, OLAP, ready-to-use charts, interactive cockpits, ad-hoc reporting, and location Intelligence.
SpagoBI integrates the open-source product TOS (Talend Open Studio) to load data into the data warehouse and manage them at your convenience. You can also enrich your analysis with personal notes and comments posted by users, and share them through a collaborative workflow.
