What's your favorite open source BI software?

What business intelligence applications are you using to gather and share insights from your data? Please let us know in our poll.
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Open source software has come a long way since the Open Source Initiative was founded in February 1998. Back then, the thought of releasing source code anyone could change scared many commercial software vendors. Now, according to Red Hat's 2019 State of Enterprise Open Source survey, 99% of IT leaders say open source software plays at least a "somewhat important" role in their enterprise IT strategy.

Open source principles play an equally key role in business intelligence (BI). Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning said the market is in the midst of a "big bang" that's redefining the "who" and "how" of data science and ML. In this report (available for clients), the authors cite open source software as one reason for the growth of citizen data scientists—"'power users' who can perform both simple and moderately sophisticated analytical tasks that would previously have required more expertise."

What is open source BI software?

Open source business intelligence (BI) software helps users upload, visualize, and make decisions based on data that is pulled from several sources. Like all open source software, its source code is public. That's because the copyright holder allows anyone to review, revise, and run the software at any time, for any reason. These benefits extend to users and non-users alike.

BI involves turning data into insights that help your business make better decisions. This type of software allows users to pull data from a range of sources, then share it with colleagues and clients.

Dashboards and reports are two standard features you should look for. Advanced BI tools like Kibana also offer data visualizations, while others (like Sisense) pride themselves on the ability to be set up in-house.

One big benefit of open source software is having so many developers fixing code at once. Likewise, open source BI software democratizes data. With countless people working on—and within—the same tool, open source BI software gives teams the power to share data with more colleagues from one centralized resource.

The quality of the data used to make decisions is a top concern for small business leaders GetApp surveyed in Spring 2019. So, before choosing which open source BI tool to adopt, it's worth weighing the pros and cons of each tool against your business needs.

Which open source BI software does your team use? What's your main goal for using it? (Boost collaboration, visualize data, use a wider range of data, etc.?) Which challenges (if any) have you encountered bringing BI software into your business? Keep this conversation going in the comments!

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    Lauren Maffeo has reported on and worked within the global technology sector. She started her career as a freelance journalist covering tech trends for The Guardian and The Next Web from London. Today, she works as a service designer for Steampunk, a human-centered design firm building civic tech solutions for government agencies.

    13 Comments

    Dashing at github.com/Smashing/smashing is a neat open source ruby library. I'm not great with Ruby, so it's slow going, but fun to mess around with.

    I use Metabase at work and for everything personal too. Great tool and very easy to setup. Mainly because it works seamlessly with MongoDb.

    Superset, hands down. Beats MetaBase, and works with all JDBC drivers.

    I actually use and love Redash and it haves a bitnami image on GCP marketplace

    I don't know when qlikview and qliksense become opensource. Almost all the listed are not opensource.bIssue is there is no robust opensource bi solution available to compete with tableau and powebi model.

    I think that's a problem we're all looking to solve, and open source options tend to rise to the surface from comments (as they have in this case!). ~~The power of crowd-sourcing!~~

    In reply to by mathans (not verified)

    Qlik (the company) has a bunch of repos on GitHub. I don't know whether or not the contents of those repos make up the entire QlikView or QlikSense systems.

    In reply to by sethkenlon

    As far as I can tell, it's just an "open API", which is nice to have but obviously definitely not the source code to the platform.

    In reply to by ScottNesbitt

    Knime is a great BI/analytics tool.

    Does this software Software ought to assist me keep an eye on your targets and of your resources to help you maintain the project on schedule?

    Thanks

    Qlik Sense, however, it's not entirely open source. There are loads of documented APIs and many open source components, but the engine I believe is closed source.

    Although I'm a big open source fan where practical, some software is worth paying for when no equivalent exists elsewhere.

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