With commercial offerings, you get
product support and years of experience. Oftentimes with the big guys who offer
consultation in developing your reports for a fee, you also get the professional
services. One of the drawbacks of commercial offerings is the large price associated
with them, both in terms of purchasing and in terms of running them. In some
companies, in addition to the initial cost (which can at times be in the thousands of
dollars) there is also a cost of yearly maintenance fees, upgrade fees, cost of licensing,
and cost of ownership that may be typically overlooked. If you are building a
large-scale custom application, are you allowed to integrate these products into your
application? If so, with what restrictions? Finally, the years of engineering behind
a product may leverage an obsolete methodology. Perhaps the technology behind
these products is no longer viable or powerful enough to handle the demands of a
growing enterprise.
Then, you have your open-source offerings. Currently there are three big names in
the open-source reporting realm: JasperReport, Pentaho, and BIRT. Two of these
projects, JasperReports and BIRT, are run by commercial companies who make their
money by doing professional services for these offerings to small scale and private
projects. Again, there are a number of pros and cons associated with open-source
solutions.
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