Open-Source Business Intelligence And Reporting Solutions: Use Or Pass?

Business intelligence and reporting solutions are available in both commercial and open-source versions. While many businesses have needs that can only be satisfied by using commercial business intelligence and reporting solutions, others would do perfectly well by sticking with open-source solutions. Here are some pros and cons of using open-source ones:

PRO #1: Connecting to Big Data sources can be done equally as well with open source.

Just as in commercial versions, many open-source versions let you connect natively to a lot of Big Data formats. “We provide low-latency or very high-velocity access to otherwise difficult-to-access data types like Mongo and Cassandra and Hadoop and so on,” said Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft. “The connectors and the linkages to all these different data types are consistent across our open-source or ‘community’ editions, and our commercial editions.”