Jaspersoft vs QlikView

March 19, 2025 | Author: Michael Stromann
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Jaspersoft
Jaspersoft is a commercial open source software vendor focused on business intelligence, including data visualization, reporting, and analytics. It's world's most widely used business intelligence suite that leverages open source for the best and most cost-effective reporting dashboards. Acquired by TIBCO Software
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QlikView
The QlikView Business Discovery platform delivers true self-service business intelligence that empowers business users and drives innovative decision making. It helps organizations make transformative discoveries that lead to better decisions. QlikView goes beyond what other BI software provides by enabling users to analyze and search their data visualizations, make associations, and uncover insight that other BI tools can't find. What will you discover?

Jaspersoft and QlikView, despite their differences, both share a deep and abiding love for data. They allow users to poke, prod and otherwise interrogate vast swaths of information in the hope of finding something useful—like a needle in a particularly uncooperative haystack. They both offer dashboards, reports and integrations with databases of all shapes and sizes and they both claim to make business intelligence easy, though in truth, the only thing truly easy about business intelligence is misinterpreting it. Also, they both graciously allow their users to deploy them either in the cloud or on their own hardware, because nothing says freedom like being overwhelmed by options.

Jaspersoft, born in 2001 in the far-off land of the United States, is the open-source rebel of the two. It thrives in the hands of developers who enjoy embedding analytics into their applications, because nothing makes a piece of software shine quite like a well-placed pie chart. Underneath its hood purrs the JasperReports engine, which speaks Java fluently and has a particular fondness for generating highly detailed reports—sometimes to the point of making people wonder if they actually needed that much detail in the first place. It’s a tool for those who prefer their data served structured, methodical and with just a hint of “you’ll need to code this yourself.”

QlikView, however, is an altogether different beast, hailing from Sweden in 1994, which makes it practically ancient in software years. It works on an associative data model, which sounds terribly sophisticated but mostly means that it does a lot of thinking for you and hopes you won’t ask too many questions. Unlike Jaspersoft, which enjoys an open-ended relationship with its users, QlikView prefers things structured, offering guided analytics that keep users from wandering too far into the wilderness of their own curiosity. It was later joined by its younger sibling, Qlik Sense, which took the family business into the age of self-service BI, but QlikView remains a favorite of business analysts who appreciate a bit of order in their otherwise chaotic spreadsheets.

See also: Top 10 Business Intelligence software
Author: Michael Stromann
Michael is an expert in IT Service Management, IT Security and software development. With his extensive experience as a software developer and active involvement in multiple ERP implementation projects, Michael brings a wealth of practical knowledge to his writings. Having previously worked at SAP, he has honed his expertise and gained a deep understanding of software development and implementation processes. Currently, as a freelance developer, Michael continues to contribute to the IT community by sharing his insights through guest articles published on several IT portals. You can contact Michael by email [email protected]