TIBCO Jaspersoft Overview

User-friendly, reporting easy, Achieves target easyily. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We were using Actuate e-reporting. The product suited our needs but the vendor was difficult to work with as far as licensing and contract issues. Also relatively much more expensive. We didn't actually even evaluate BIRT as a replacement due to the poor relationship. So I can only really compare to the e-report designer/iportal/iserver combination. We found the architecture to be very similar. We found Actuate's report server software to be better for monitoring job executions which was quite important to us. We found the designers to be similar in quality. Jasper studio seems to be less mature, but more feature rich. However some of the features don't quite work as expected. We found more things could be accomplished with Jasper without resorting to writing code. We were somewhat surprised by the lack of Jasper's support for printing to printers, but in the end it has not been an issue and was easily worked around. The support and ease of generating PDFs from Jasper is quite good. We evaluated Pentaho as well on the road to a replacement. We found it to be similar to Jasper but felt Jasper had the edge with exposure and install base.
I would like to see an administrator dashboard in the report server tool to monitor report generations, report failures, currently running reports with ability to kill long running reports, etc. GUI access to the many, many settings that can be added/tweaked on the report server. I would like to see easier access to add functions within the report without writing an external jar file. we don't use java on a day to day basis so I found the process of adding a custom library of functions a little awkward. We also allow our users to make copies of our reports to customize on their own. Since they are non-technical, the process of writing a function for themselves is usually over their heads. Our customers are very much missing the ability to select specific fields from a print-ready report display and export to Excel. Our previous product had it and we hear it from everyone as we replace it. Current export of a print-formatted report to Excel tries to render it so it looks visibly the same, but it just ends up unusable for any sort of normal spreadsheet usage.