Open Source Reporting Comparison - BIRT, Jasper, Pentaho

There are a number of open source business intelligence and reporting tools available. Of all the options, the three with the most traction seem to be BIRT, Jasper®, and Pentaho®. Over the last six years, Innovent Solutions has chosen to focus on BIRT; however our focus is on Business Intelligence and Reporting first, and much of the work that we do is technology independent. In our experience, non-technology related items such as requirements gathering and analysis, architecture, implementation and maintenance are the key elements of successful BI projects.

Professional curiosity always keeps us interested in all three of the tools. We like to see what Jasper and Pentaho are doing, and how their products compare with BIRT. Each of these products has continued to grow and evolve over the last five years and we wanted to have a look at each of the products to see how they compare.

For this evaluation, we choose to focus on pure open source report development for each product. In the future we hope to re-visit the commercial report designers.  In addition, we hope to look at the rest of the product suites, including data management solutions, server and deployment options, and ad-hoc / dashboard solutions.  

NOTE:  We did our best to present a fair and balanced evaluation of the products. That said, our expertise lies in the use of BIRT. We welcome any comments or thoughts that you would like to share. You may also contact us directly through This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

UPDATE: Each of the products reviewed has had a major release recently, including Jaspersoft 4, Pentaho BI 4 and BIRT 3.7. Innovent will be releasing an update to our comparison in February 2012 so please check back.

To review our analysis, please select from the links below.

BIRT versus Jasper®

BIRT versus Pentaho®

OSS Reporting Comparison Matrix