Jaspersoft vs. Roambi (discontinued)

TIBCO Jaspersoft is well suited for users who are not too technical. These users are able to easily drag and drop domain fields from their database to create friendly table reports. Users can easily add filters to their reports which allows for reusability. On the other hand, if a user is looking to add information that has many-to-many relationships, duplicates will appear. Having duplicates in an ad-hoc view and not being able to easily remove them is a big issue for many of our clients.

Incentivized

I would recommend Roambi for its ease-of-use and quick deployment. It is very visually rich and eye-catching, and I believe it is best suited for presenting business & finance dashboard to C-level management and sales representatives in the field. Because it can be accessed on the iPhone or iPad, it is very mobile and the Apple touch interfaces are nearly flawless. If an organization needs to really dig deep into their data, I would look elsewhere, as Roambi has certain limitations.

• Jaspersoft has an excellent self-service module that allows ad hoc report creation and can be easily worked by non-technical users as well.
• Using this tool, it doesn't matter if you are viewing the report on a desktop screen or smaller mobile screens, the experience is seamless.

Incentivized

• Very intuitive user interface that exploits the touch capabilities of tablets and smartphones very well.
• Offline capability - extremely helpful for sales people that can not always be online.
• Integration with existing BI solutions - almost all of our clients have already a BI Infrastructure. Roambi integrates very well.

• The UI on the report designer, Jaspersoft Studio, looks a little outdated. I think that Studio as a whole could use a facelift. Additionally, Jaspersoft Studio tends to slow down over time, requiring a restart of the program.
• There is a bit of a learning curve with all of the intricacies of Jaspersoft Studio, it's kind of overwhelming when trying to learn it from nothing.
• One functionality that seems to be missing, that would help our use-case, would be the ability to parameterize a JSON URL as a data source. For example, if there was a call to a set of JSON data, it has to be a static URL. But in many cases, APIs that return JSON take parameters via the URL. Jaspersoft does not support that.

Incentivized

• The system that performs the rendering of data to the front-end can be improved to intelligently read the back end data template or at least the layout. Inserting new rows/columns of data completely messes up the rendering on the front end and the process of re-selecting information to ensure proper rendering is a very tedious one.
• Also, Roambi should have the capability to analyse information in formats other than excel such as word, ppts and/or pdfs. I found the lack of this capability a major hurdle because each time I had to export information into excel to render into a template.

We've converted our library of reports to use Jaspersoft. Our clients have had a taste of Jaspersoft and we've had very positive feedback from those interactions. Our internal employees have had great success using iReports and JasperStudio to create very robust reports that better show the data our clients expect to see. Overall, our experiences with Jaspersoft have been great and it's proven to be a very good decision for the direction of our business.

The only reason we would not renew is if there is something out there that is less expensive that is cross-platform for mobile devices. Our clients are no longer exclusively using iOS, so in order to keep their business, we need to change with them.

I think it's a tool well suited for a software developer. Others with less coding skills could struggle somewhat with the tool. I find java a little unforgiving as a language for expressions and not very user friendly for the technically dis-inclined. Sometimes the numeric conversions cause issues (who knew that 0 and 0.0 would cause different things to happen). Previous experience with a reporting tool that used visual basic for its' expressions that I found much simpler to use. On the other hand, java is so widespread, you can easily google the syntax to accomplish what you need to do.

Incentivized

VERY easy to use. Only limited by how the graphs and data is initially set up.

There have been a few instances where Tomcat has consumed 100% CPU, which requires a restart to resolve, but other than that reliability has been excellent.

Incentivized

Complex reports on heavy data load may take considerable amount of time. We have experinced some latencies/misfires regarding to this.

Incentivized

They have a great customer support ticketing system in which they always respond same-day. They offer conference calls with srcreensharing as well in order to better understand your issues.

I wish that the lower level support access came with more than just 12 cases per year though as this makes us less likely to reach out for questions on things that we then instead try to solve ourselves which results in loss of time in trying to acquire new features and or solve a problem.

Incentivized

It did the job of getting us to our deadline we set for ourselves for initial launch. The customer we launched the product for was also there to learn about it at the same in order to better understand the capabilities. This helped greatly so that the customer was on the same page on what was possible when using jaspersoft. I think most people would not want their customers aware the product they are using is third-party but in this case it was a new experience for us both and so as we learned more about jaspersoft, we both had better communication on what the future road map was for their business needs in BI.

Incentivized

Resources available in the TIBCO Knowledge Base are covering almost everything. They are well organized, and covering almost every possibility. There is always the change to get back to the TIBCO support or to the dedicated Customer Success Manager whenever something very specific or bound to a customization is not covered.

Incentivized

Super easy to install and/or upgrade! For all the big name software out there that does some business critical things, Jasper is a pleasure to install and/or upgrade. The bundled installer is all ONE install (one shell script execution at least) that sets up everything. Vastly superior to most other software of this caliber.

Incentivized

TIBCO does a better job in providing seamless data mapping and migration from one legacy system to other without any loss of traffic or compromising the security of the data. Whereas with another tool sometimes because of the integral framework there may be some questions as to why the data packets were lost during mapping and migration.

Incentivized

Comparing the mobile capabilities of both products - as of course, Tibco Spotfire is a complete solution whereas Roambi focuses on mobility. While some would argue that the ten View (template) limitation of Roambi works in favor of competitors, we have found this to be untrue. Users quickly get used to this native interfaces, which are found across the templates. Additionally, the ten available Views cover 99% of the types of reports or insights you'd ever need. If this is not the case, are you sure you are asking the right questions?

We haven't really started to explore the scalability of the product as yet, but in terms of existing deployments it has done what we need it to do.

Incentivized

• I used the free version, so obviously the positive side is we did not have to pay
• Next advantage is you can pick it up relatively fast, even though I think the UI can be much improved. Otherwise creating PDF reports by programming is quite a complicate task, to me anyway

• positive ROI
• and any analytical tool needs more historical data for accurate analysis, in that case, roambi 's part is as a presenter can't influence the ROI exactly..
• overall objective its a value addition for sap based data analytics and others as well.
• for CIO or analytics people good tool to convince their business users and executives.

Incentivized