Open Source Business Intelligence Tools

Business intelligence tools provide the analytical and visualization capabilities that allow end users to analyze their data. They can range in terms of complexity, ease of use, and feature sets, but all are designed to help uncover insights through visualization.

In contrast to traditional BI software, open-source business intelligence platforms deliver enterprise-grade analytics and reporting while keeping their source code free and open for anyone to inspect, modify, and share.

Open-source BI tools are like the Robin Hoods here — robbing the rich features from proprietary software to give to the poor… or at least to those unwilling to pay exorbitant licensing fees.

These open-source crusaders come in two flavors: those developed and maintained by a community, thriving on collaboration and innovation, and those launched by companies, often as open-source versions of their proprietary solutions. These company-backed tools might offer a basic free version with the option to upgrade for advanced features or support.

To guide you through the landscape of open-source BI tools, here’s a curated list of twelve popular options available today (listed in no particular order).

Eclipse Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is an open-source software project to provide a platform for reporting functionality and data visualizations. It includes a visual report designer and a charting engine. The designs you create can be used across many data sources.

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Apache Superset is a “modern data exploration and visualization platform.” This is an open source project with options including built-in visualizations, charts, and interactive dashboards. It is lightweight, flexible to connect to any SQL-based datasource, and is highly scalable. 

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Seal Report is an open source project framework for daily reporting from any database, providing basic querying, charts, and web reports. It differs from other tools in that it was developed for the Microsoft .Net Framework. 

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The Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite Community Edition is a platform consisting of different components. JasperReports is the reporting server, which can create analytics to be embedded or otherwise shared. The BI Suite also includes Jaspersoft Studio, which is an Eclipse-based report designer that features a report editing interface for visual report design that allows you to create complex layouts and  preview your data. The Jaspersoft BI Suite Commercial Edition includes additional functionality, including ad hoc and dashboard design. 

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Metabase is a software vendor that offers a pared-down, free open-source edition of its intuitive, user friendly software with charts, dashboards, visualizations, and scheduling. They also offer a variety of paid tiers that can be utilized from the cloud or on premises with additional functionality..

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ReportServer Community Edition

ReportServer Community allows you access to a variety of tools within a single platform interface. From within ReportServer, you can utilize some of the different reporting tools listed above, such as Eclipse BIRT or JasperReport, as well as other reporting tools and an OLAP server. The ReportServer Enterprise edition provides additional functionality for a fee. 

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KNIME Analytics Platform

KNIME Analytics Platform is an intuitive platform that provides ease of use for beginners and robust tools for more experienced analysts. It utilizes visual workflows and a low-code/no-code interface while offering the possibility for coding or using ML libraries for advanced analysts. KNIME Hub is commercial software that can be added on for additional capabilities.

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Helical Insight Community Edition

Helical Insight Community Edition is a simplified version of their BI platform, with basic reporting and scheduling. The premium Enterprise version provides access to the UI driven designers, search driven analytics, and ad hoc reporting.

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Preset Cloud

Powered by Apache Superset, Preset Cloud is a fully managed service to create custom, interactive analytics, with visual or SQL-based queries, dashboards, and visualizations. The free version allows up to 5 users. 

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FineReport

FineReport is a reporting tool that allows users to design and generate reports and publish them to a report server to be viewed on a variety of devices, including mobile apps or large presentation screens. The fully functional application is free for personal use; pricing is available for commercial use.

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Cube

Cube is an open-source semantic layer for building data applications and APIs. Rather than connecting directly to a data source, Cube sits between your data warehouse and your BI tools, enforcing consistent metrics definitions and access controls across your entire stack. It supports SQL, REST, and GraphQL APIs, making it a popular choice for teams embedding analytics into production applications.

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Lightdash

Lightdash is an open-source BI tool built natively on top of dbt, turning your existing dbt models and metrics directly into charts and dashboards. It’s designed for data teams that already live in dbt and want a lightweight, version-controlled alternative to heavier BI platforms, with a clean interface that makes self-service analytics accessible to non-technical stakeholders.

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GoodData

GoodData is an open-source analytics platform focused on embedded and multi-tenant BI, with a strong emphasis on a reusable semantic layer to keep metric definitions consistent across dashboards and applications. It supports self-service reporting, custom dashboards, and an API-first architecture. A cloud-hosted version with additional enterprise features is also available.

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Grafana

Grafana is a widely adopted open-source platform for data visualization and observability, best known for its powerful, flexible dashboards and deep integrations with time-series databases like Prometheus and InfluxDB.

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Malloy

Malloy is an experimental open-source language and runtime for describing data relationships and transformations, developed by Google. It combines the querying capabilities of SQL with the semantic modeling of a BI tool into a single, composable language, letting analysts define reusable data models that can power both ad hoc exploration and production reporting.

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Evidence

Evidence is an open-source framework for building data products using SQL and markdown, offering a code-driven alternative to traditional drag-and-drop BI tools. It allows users to create reports, decision-support tools, and embedded dashboards by writing SQL queries within markdown files, which are then rendered into interactive websites featuring charts, components, and templated pages. The framework connects to various data sources including data warehouses and flat files, and provides features like loops and conditional statements to control content display.

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Elastic Stack: (ELK) Elasticsearch, Kibana & Logstash

The Elastic Stack (ELK Stack) is a comprehensive data platform built around Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine based on Apache Lucene. With Kibana providing visualization capabilities and Logstash enabling data ingestion from over 200 sources, the stack allows organizations to aggregate, search, analyze, and visualize their data in real-time.

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Knowage

KNOWAGE is an open-source analytics and business intelligence platform that combines traditional data analysis with big data and cloud capabilities. The platform enables organizations to explore, prepare, and visualize data from multiple sources including traditional databases, NoSQL, and cloud services, while offering features like self-service analytics, data mining, and interactive reporting.

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Redash

Redash is an open-source business intelligence platform that connects to various data sources and creates interactive dashboards. It combines the functionality of a SQL client with collaborative features, allowing teams to create, schedule, and share data visualizations with auto-complete, query snippets, and result caching for efficient data analysis. Note that the hosted cloud version was discontinued in 2021, so Redash is now self-hosted only. The project continues to be maintained by the open source community.

An open source BI tool is only as good as the data it pulls

Some of the best data teams are investing in data observability before deploying an open source BI tool. Data comes in fast and messy and it only takes one instance of conflicting or stale data to lose trust in your BI reports.

Setting up a data observability solution first like Monte Carlo gives insights into the health, usage, and lineage of your data, leading to insights that help you unlock the most value from your data.

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