Competitive comparison: Jaspersoft vs. Amazon QuickSight

With so much data available today, not taking advantage of it to make strategic business decisions is setting your business up for failure. However, analyzing, reporting, and interpreting data can become overwhelming for businesses of all sizes, especially if the data is in large volumes, scattered across several systems, and in formats that are difficult to digest. 

That's why reporting and embedded analytics tools like Jaspersoft and Amazon QuickSight are sought after by organizations that rely on analytics and reports for success. But which of the two should your organization choose and why?

Key takeaways

Jaspersoft and Amazon QuickSight are both powerful reporting tools, but each has a distinct focus. 

Jaspersoft excels in pixel-perfect reporting, advanced customization, and embedded analytics. This makes it ideal for enterprises needing detailed, tailored reports and seamless integration into their applications. It’s also highly customizable and connects to a wide range of data sources but may have a steeper learning curve. As for price, Jaspersoft offers flexible models based on your use case, with annual subscriptions based on capacity or original equipment manufacturer (OEM) models, and bring your own license (BYOL) options through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

QuickSight, meanwhile, emphasizes ease of use, serverless computing, and cloud-native capabilities. It offers paginated reports, embedding options, and machine learning (ML) capabilities for anomaly detection and data insights. While its user-role-based pricing is cost-effective for organizations with varying usage needs, its customization options and flexibility in embedding analytics are more limited. Additionally, if you're adding many users, this pricing model can get expensive.

Platform options

Jaspersoft offers versatile deployment options for organizations no matter the environment. Any deployment scenario is possible with Jaspersoft, whether on-premises, in a private cloud, or within a public cloud. Even for AWS, Jaspersoft has deployment options for Marketplace,  Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Elastic Container Service (ECS) or direct deployment via a virtual machine (VM).

As for QuickSight, it is a hosted analytics service that runs exclusively on AWS. This single-platform limitation may be less suitable for organizations seeking deployment flexibility outside the AWS ecosystem.

Embedded analytics

Users need to be able to access reports and information right in the applications and systems they work with. Embedded analytics eliminates the need for employees to switch between tools, thus expediting the decision-making processes. 

Jaspersoft's flexible, API-first approach allows developers to integrate reporting and analytics capabilities seamlessly into various applications. Its JavaScript API (Visualize.js) allows developers to interact with this tool's functionalities to create a customized experience to match the integrated components' behavior, look, and feel to the host application. Their multi-tenancy support enables OEMs to build an analytics application once and deliver it to many different customers, all within a single instance. This allows each client to have their own isolated data environment while benefiting from the same underlying application infrastructure.

QuickSight's embedding capabilities are more aligned with delivering pre-built dashboards and visuals within the QuickSight platform rather than allowing for full customization inside an application. Nonetheless, its cloud-native focus makes it a great choice for businesses already utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) services.

It’s worth noting that QuickSight can result in additional charges based on the chosen pricing model. The costs associated with embedding often depend on the number of active users, sessions, or the capacity required for interactive visualizations. 

Pixel-perfect reports

Pixel-perfect reporting allows users to create final outputs, or reports, with exact specifications or layouts identical to pre-existing forms or templates. This is essential for report consistency and is especially important for industries requiring strict adherence to standards or specifications. As an added benefit, pixel-perfect reports can be accurately exported, allowing business stakeholders to quickly interpret business insights.

While both Jaspersoft and QuickSight support pixel-perfect reporting, there are a few key differences in their capabilities. 

Jaspersoft gives users the ability to create highly detailed, complex reports. It provides granular control over every element of the report including filtering, sorting, and grouping parameters, expressions, sub-reports, and scriptlets. As such, Jaspersoft users need to have technical know-how to navigate the Studio development environment. It's worth noting that users can leverage Jaspersoft to maintain pixel-perfect reporting across various output formats (PDF, XLSX, HTML, and others), platforms, and applications.

QuickSight offers a simplified version of pixel-perfect reporting that is best for basic paginated reports with an intuitive user interface. This feature is available as an add-on and is more of a drag-and-drop design environment, making it easy for less experienced users to use.  However, this ease of use comes at the expense of granular control. Users looking to tailor every element of their reports—such as an accurate rendering of layout, font styles, and dynamic elements—may find QuickSight’s customization capabilities lacking.

Scalability

Both tools can be used to handle increased load and organizational growth. 

For Jaspersoft, it can scale elastically via microservices architecture and Kubernetes (k8s) deployment. This means your organization can execute millions of reports on mission-critical applications while keeping a check on the computing cost.  

On the other hand, QuickSight offers a serverless, cloud-native architecture that automatically scales with user demand.

Pricing

While price shouldn't be the deciding factor, it's still important to consider when choosing between the two tools. 

Jaspersoft offers a flexible pricing model that aligns with infrastructural requirements and pricing is based on CPU cores or OEM needs, rather than user counts. This model makes it appealing for larger companies or organizations looking to redistribute Jaspersoft inside their applications.  Additional features like multi-tenancy, audit logging, and professional support are included with annual subscription options.  

As for QuickSight, it implements a pay-per-user model, which can be more cost-effective for smaller organizations. Pricing tiers are based on use roles like Reader, Author, and Author Pro, with differentiated costs based on usage levels. However, there are additional costs for essential features such as pixel-perfect reporting, SPICE storage, and ML-powered anomaly detection. These add-ons can increase total expenses, especially for organizations needing comprehensive functionality. 

Which is the better option?

Ultimately, whether you choose Jaspersoft or QuickSight depends on your specific deployment needs, embedding requirements, reporting complexity, and budget. 

If your organization prioritizes a tight AWS integration or prefers a pay-per-session pricing model, Amazon QuickSight may be your best option. Choose Jaspersoft if you require high customization, have specific or complex reporting needs, or prefer a more flexible solution for embedded analytics. 

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