When comparing Tableau vs Jasper Reports, the Slant community recommends Tableau for most people. In the question“What are the best reporting and business intelligence (BI) tools?” Tableau is ranked 3rd while Jasper Reports is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Tableau is:
If you want to start using Tableau at your company, you don't need huge IT resources or start a big BI deployment. Just purchase the software, install, and you're ready to go. Maybe you don't need ANY IT help at all.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro No complex installations / IT approvals needed
If you want to start using Tableau at your company, you don't need huge IT resources or start a big BI deployment. Just purchase the software, install, and you're ready to go. Maybe you don't need ANY IT help at all.
Pro Powerful
Tableau makes it easy to SEE your data and make business decisions based on it.
Pro Appealing visualizations
Hard to compare with what you have to code by hand (Shiny)
Pro Great support
Both Tableau's support team AND the user community are super helpful and enthusiastic about the product.
Pro Easy to learn
You don't have to be super techy to understand it. You can learn how to use Desktop over the course of two days.
Pro Has many more output formats than Nextreports
Pro Easy to learn
Pro Eclipse-based report designer is fairly easy to use
Jasperstudio report designer is easy enough to grok. It is full of features for designing your reports in a wysiwyg manner.
Pro Can be run as a service (server version) that allows deep links to individual reports or embedded with your web app as a library
You may or may not want a server version with its own learning curve and API. With Jasper you have the option of server vs library. With either one you can whip up reports and make them available in PDF, XML, HTML, CSV, XLS, RTF or TXT format. It's not very difficult to do that with JasperReports. And there are many examples out there to learn from.
Cons
Con Some simple tasks are sometimes not easy to calculate.
Con Addictive
Once you start using Tableau you don't want to use any other software anymore. So if your manager is obsessed with e.g. Excel, you may have issues.
Con Geared towards Java programmers
Extremely slow to load