Free and open-source BI tool has high search volumes on tech forums for they play an essential role in the business area. This article will tell you all about the most popular and practical open source BI tool in 2023. Feel free to take advantage of it!

What are the Benefits of Using a Free and Open-source BI tool?

Full-service BI tools can get expensive quickly, but free and open-source BI tools can help you control your budget. 

Some of the free BI tools has its paid version. Although compared to the paid version, not all free BI tool provides stunning data visualization; they offer easy-to-understand charts that can meet your basic needs.

Open-source capabilities make everyone can access to the source code to customize it, to develop a specific feature to make your requirements.

I listed 10 BEST Free and Open Source BI Tools for you as a reference. Let’s dive in!

An In-Depth Look at the Most Powerful Free and Open Source BI Tool

1. FineBI

FineBI is a modern big data analytics & BI software designed for everyone who has a need for data analysis. Everyone of any level can use FineBI to easily establish professional BI dashboards, perform self-service data analysis, gain useful insights and thus drive your business forward.

FineBI provides interfaces for commonly used features, making it easier for custom development. And, clients are enabled to reuse customized features via the plugin market.

Other prominent features of this software include,

• Open APIs for customization
• OLAP Analysis
• Spider Big Data Engine
• Scheduled Task
• Relation Model
• Self Dataset
• Chart/Table/Filter component
• Mobile BI
• User Management 

FineBI is free without time or feature limits for personal use. For enterprises, it offers a quote-based plan that charges according to different situations. In a word, FineBI is price-friendly to all customers.

2. FineReport

FineReport is a BI tool that adopts popular 3-tier architecture. The most distinct is its reporting capabilities. Because FineReport can be seamlessly integrated with any data source, it is convenient to import data from Excel in batches to empower historical data or generate MIS reports from various business systems. Another distinct trait of this software is its feature of data entry. Users can input the data back to the database via the web reports created by FineReport. 

Same as FineBI, FineReport is free for personal users, without time and function limits. It also provides a quote-based Plan for business users.

The other prominent features of this software include,

• Open APIs for customization
• Dynamic reports
• Query reports
• HTML5 charts 
• Task Scheduler
• Mobile BI
• Report Management 
• User Management 
• Task Scheduler

Feel free to make an appointment for a live demo with our product experts. We will be more clear about your needs and see how FineReport can help you and your organization to transform data into value.

The Differences Between FineBI and FineReport

Finereport and FineBI are both data analysis tools under FanRuan Software Co., Ltd. A great number of enterprises choose to employ Finereport and FineBI at the same time. Through the perfect combination and complementarity of Finereport and FineBI, it is way more easier to meet enterprises’ needs of complex reports and real-time data analysis.

To summarize:

FineBI is a self-service BI tool designed for all employees in the company and especially the data analysts. The operation of FineBI is very simple and clear, focusing on allowing every employee to achieve self-service data analysis. The final reports and data analysis results of are for leaders and management team to make decisions through the analysis results.

FineReport is a reporting tool, suitable for IT staffs or report developers specially set by some enterprises. Other departments can view the reports produced by IT staffs or update the data. The speed of  report production depends on the reporting tool you are using. For example, FineReport uses an excel-like design interface to greatly improve production efficiency and save IT staff a lot of time.

It should be emphasized that these two types of BI have their own advantages, they are not alternatives and they are suitable in different working scenarios, and . They will coexist for a long time for enterprises to choose according to their needs until the basic conditions of informatization change fundamentally. Referring to Gartner’s dual-mode IT model, it is recommended that enterprises should judge which type of BI is more suitable for them, or whether FineReport and FineBI need to be used in combination according to their own data processing maturity and demands.  

If you want know more about the differences between Finereport and FineBI, you can refer to the article: Differences between Finereport and FineBI .

If you want to know more about FineBI and how Finereport and/or FineBI can best suit your needs, you can click the button below and talk to our team to get your personalized plan!

3. Tableau Public 

Tableau public offers free bi tools for creative people to learn the products with minimal investment, as well as provides a platform to share data visualizations and insights within the world. It is used by potential customers to evaluate both the Desktop and Server applications.

Tableau Public is similar but removes the download functionality. 

The biggest cons of the Tableau Public is that any data used in the program is ‘public’ and therefore not secure. And, with Tableau Public, published workbooks are “disconnected” from the underlying data sources and require periodic updates when the data changes.

4. BIRT

Birt is an open-source Eclipse-based business intelligence platform for small businesses. It is good at bi reporting with a variety of handy features.

Birt is composed of two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a run time component that you can add to your app server. 

One of the platform’s main missions is to create reports that can easily embed anywhere, and that’s exactly what it does. 

However, it sometimes doesn’t work when you are continuously changing your report. And it’s data, and property binding requires too much time to fix in the report.

5. KNIME

KNIME is an open-source BI tool specialized for data linkage, integration, and analysis. It provides data scientists and BI executives with data mining, machine learning, and data visualization capabilities to build effective data pipelines.  

It also can be used to create a predictive model for various business domains and kinds of models, such as classification, regression, and clustering. 

When requiring high customization and sophisticated models, the speed is needed. But KNIME is less flexible and slow. 

6. Databox 

Databox is a free cloud-based BI tool that provides a single interface for marketers, CEOs, analysts to track KPIs and generate reports. 

It is best for tracking marketing activities because DataBox supports dozens of one-click integrations with sources such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Salesforce, Shopify. 

And data calculation function makes calculate ratios such as visit-to-signup rate, signup-to-paid rate quickly, which can help you identify significant trends. 

Besides, Databox can be deployed via the cloud, SaaS, and the web, and offers mobile applications for iOS and Android.

However, it lacks customization and visual effects compared to other bit tools.

7. Metabase

Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool that allows you to manage database, monitor KPI, track bug, filer record, generate dashboards with simple ad hoc queries without using complex SQL statements. It allows users to ask questions about data. The tool then displays answers in formats that make the most sense, whether in a bar graph or a detailed table. 

It is also effortless to set up; you can run Metabase on your laptop, or set it up on your servers for your company’s use. You only need to run a jar, login, tell it how to get to your database. The process just takes 5 minutes. The bad news is it’s only available for Macs.

8. Seal Report

Seal Report is an open-source reporting tool for the Microsoft .Net Framework, entirely written in C#. It offers a complete framework for producing reports and dashboards from any database without coding. Seal Report focuses on easy installation and reports design. 

Key features include native pivot tables, HTML5 charts, report scheduler, drill-down navigation, and subreports.

However, Seal Report does not offer a free version or a free trial; the price starts at $778.08 per year.

9. Pentaho Community Edition 

Pentaho from Hitachi Vantara offers a suite of open source business intelligence(BI) products that help IT and business users to do data integration, OLAP services, reporting, dashboarding, data mining and ETL capabilities.

Pentaho’s open-source heritage drives continued innovation in a modern, unified, flexible analytics platform that helps organizations accelerate their analytic data pipelines.  

However, if you are not at all familiar with writing script, this program can be very challenging. And the community edition has many bugs that are usually not so easy to solve.

10. SpagoBI 

SpagoBI is a 100% open source Business intelligence suite that covers all the analytical areas of Business Intelligence projects, developed by Open Source Competency Centre of Engineering Group in Italian. 

Based on open standards, its modular architecture allows easy customization and integration into legacy environments. 

It includes engines for reporting, multidimensional analysis (OLAP), charts, KPI, interactive cockpit, ad-hoc reporting, location intelligence, free inquiry, real-time dashboards, mobile, master data management, ETL and more.

However, Spagobi’s architecture requires four components in order to run the complete software. The data works, but there are some issues in connecting to internal databases, even though the software was installed inside the same server.

Summary

Besides the benefits of these open-source bi tools mentioned above, we can’t ignore their disadvantages: unable to meet the complex needs, bugs can not be solved in time. As a result, you should conduct bi tools comparison carefully. You can use the paid version of these bi tools to make up for these shortcomings.

Keen to explore the full potential of BI tools? Dive in with our comprehensive guide:

Top BI Tools: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024