A comparative analysis of open source business intelligence platforms

Business Intelligence (BI) platforms are applications to analyze critical business data so as to gain new insights about business and markets. The new insights can be used for improving products and services, achieving better operational efficiency, improve competitiveness, and fostering customer relationships. However, we notice that BI is not yet a reality in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and it's even unknown in many of these organizations. The implementation of BI in organizations depends on their specificities. It is essential that the information available on platforms and their functionality comes clearly to organizations. Only a correct choice, in response to business needs, will allow powerful data that results in gains and business success. For this purpose, we have developed a comparative analysis of the existing capabilities in the various BI tools, which is intended to assist the selection of the BI platform best suited to each organization and/or business area. In this paper, we study and compare seven of the most used open source BI platforms: Actuate, JasperSoft, OpenI, Palo, Pentaho, SpagoBI and Vanilla.