Everybody loves free stuff. Whether you’re a college kid clamoring for a free T-shirt or someone who enjoys free samples at Costco, there isn’t a person alive who dislikes free things.
Speaking of freebies, reporting software can be yours for a flat rate of $0. And no, we don’t mean for a limited time. We mean forever, never-have-to-open-your-wallet free reporting tools.
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Free software can be great when starting with business intelligence and data analytics. That said, there are certain limitations in addition to their impressive benefits.
Let’s review some of free reporting tools’ biggest pros and cons.
What Is Free Reporting Software?
Free reporting software solutions are insight-generation platforms publicly available for download or as free web-based subscriptions. They offer multiple report types, many providing visual reporting with graphs, charts, maps and plots.
Not all but many reporting software are free and satisfactorily serve individual or limited user needs. We’ll discuss some examples ahead.
You may not get augmented analytics features like automation, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), but they’ll address your primary reporting needs.
Leading vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce offer free software — Power BI and Tableau. Why would the vendor do it?
It helps them expand their market and establish their brand identity. Now that the vendor has a database of free subscribers, they can personalize outreach with upgrade offers to the paid version. It’s a win-win for vendors and users alike.
Pros
They’re Free
Yes, we’re starting with the most obvious advantage: free reporting systems can tremendously help your bottom line.
Full-feature reporting tools can get expensive quickly. Although there are vendors that make their platforms accessible for $10/user/month, there are some that go higher than $250/user/month or $3,000/user/year.
And if you choose to deploy on-premise, implementation and management costs alone can skyrocket. For businesses that want reporting and visualization, free reporting tools can be highly beneficial.
Powerful Basic Functions
Many free reporting solutions have the same functionality as the paid versions. Power BI Desktop is an example.
A finance report in Power BI. Source
Not all free reporting software solutions have the most powerful data visualizations, but they provide easy-to-understand charts, graphs and data points. Some free reporting tools like Tableau offer dynamic report builders for presentation-ready data visualization.
Open-Source
Not all free solutions are open source code. If you’re unaware, open-source tools are community-driven and maintained software programs.
A sales performance dashboard in Tableau. Source
Everyone has access to the source code, so they can customize it however they want. Software customization is one of the most significant benefits, as you can develop a feature for a specific report your company needs.
Another benefit is that updates happen more frequently than with a traditional BI reporting vendor. Because a whole community works on improving the software, updates, added features and bug fixes occur much more frequently.
And if you have developers on staff, they can help improve the software by adding their features and workarounds.
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Cons
Limited Functionality
Although free reporting tools have many powerful features, they lack the advanced capabilities of their paid counterparts.
Solutions such as QlikView don’t allow sharing capabilities, so whoever makes the report is the only one who can access it without printing.
All free reporting platforms may not have robust sharing and collaboration features. Some are single-user tools that limit you from sharing insights with your clients.
You must rely on external media, like email clients and messaging apps, and only if the files are compatible with that application.
Live updates are resource-intensive and power-saving features like incremental refreshes are available in paid solutions. They refresh only the data that changed. Power BI Desktop is one such example.
Branding, scheduled report delivery and automation might be missing in free tools.
Lack of Scalability
There’s a reason SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) almost exclusively use free reporting tools. Many of them have a single-user limit.
Additionally, free reporting software providers often cap how much data the system can process daily, weekly or monthly. Although a small business can survive with one person reporting, you might outgrow the platform as the business grows.
Also, some free tools don’t provide adequate data security for sensitive data like users’ financial details or personally identifiable information (PII). Users won’t trust you if you can’t guarantee data safety.
Open Source Code
Yes, this makes both lists. Open-source reporting tools — like all open-code technology — are community-based. Although they have their advantages, it also means little to no support is available.
If there’s an issue like a system failure, you can’t just call up the customer service team and have them fix it for you. You have to wait for the next update or have developers on hand to fix the system and maintain it long-term.
Although it isn’t ideal, it’s cheaper than implementing on-premise software.
Another drawback is they aren’t always user-friendly. Without the budget to fund a user-friendly interface, open-source systems often must make do with a bare-bones UI.
Sometimes you hit the jackpot when the UI is clean and easy. But more often than not, open-source software can be challenging to learn for people who aren’t tech-savvy. It isn’t an issue if most potential users can learn tech quickly.
If not, you may find that the time needed to learn the system isn’t worth it. You don’t want people spending half their day finding out how to work the report wizard.
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Best Free Reporting Tools
Free reporting tools for Excel data are in demand, so we’ve compiled a list of a few of the best free reporting platform vendors.
*Side Note: Excel is a commonly-used, basic and cheap solution for reporting. However, since it’s not technically free, we’ve excluded it from this list.
Free Editions of Industry Leaders
We discuss the free editions of industry leaders here. These reporting tools have the ease of use, support and financial backing of the paid editions.
Microsoft Power BI
Power BI Desktop a freely downloadable BI and data visualization software. It’s part of the Power BI suite, serving its Query, Pivot and View modules. Data modeling enables mapping dataset relationships to generate reports.
A sales forecast dashboard in Power BI. Source
Desktop’s interactive interface speeds up reporting and visual analysis. Power BI files are shareable, and uploading them to the Power BI Service is the most common method of sharing insights.
The vendor releases monthly updates, incorporating customer requests and new features regularly. Support is available only for the most recent version.
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Tableau
As the name alludes, Tableau Public makes the analyzed and visualized data publicly available for free.
Featuring most of the capabilities from Tableau’s paid offerings, Public allows you to create, save, store and share custom reports through social media or embed them on a webpage.
It’s an excellent platform to practice visual analysis skills and connect to like-minded data enthusiasts.
Tableau’s Show Me feature speeds up chart building and analysis. Source
It’s part of the vendor’s drive for greater data literacy and an excellent way for commercial users to engage with their product before making a purchase decision.
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QlikView
Qlik offers the Personal Edition of Qlikview for free — it’s the full-featured Desktop product using the same installation package. Since it’s a local instance, the files you create are limited to that computer — in fact, they are bound to it by a user key.
You can’t open it on a different computer, share it or access others’ files. Though recovering the file is possible by generating a new user key, you can’t retrieve it on your previous computer. There’s a limit of four user key changes.
Telephone and email support isn’t available, but you can contact the online Qlik Community for troubleshooting and general queries.
For QlikView users, the vendor offers a cost-effective upgrade to Qlik Sense. Sign up for its free trial to take it for a test run.
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Open-Source Options
Open-source business intelligence and reporting software may make the most sense for enterprises that value customization and software ownership.
Pentaho
Pentaho Report Designer is reporting software free for download from the vendor’s website or SourceForge. Though tutorials are available, experienced data professionals are its primary users as the platform requires data modeling, SQL and report design.
You can use it as a standalone or part of Pentaho Business Analytics, which is also open-source.
Pentaho reports are shareable and sophisticated. The platform supports many visualization and export format types.
You can view and interact with reports within dashboards and format the layout. The platform has column resizing and sorting, drag-and-drop report design, font selection and unlimited redo and undo functionality.
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Company Size Suitability: S M L
Birt
BIRT is an acronym for “Business Intelligence Reporting Tools.” It’s an open-source visual reports designer on Eclipse, serving Java and Java EE-based web applications.
A runtime component enables deploying reports to any JAVA environment. A charting engine incorporates charts into any application via the report designer and as a standalone module.
Report scheduling and delivery via email client and FTP integrations is possible. Many report types, including HTML, PDF, Excel and Word, are available.
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Company Size Suitability: S M L
Next Steps
Free reporting systems serve as an introduction to the software — you can always upgrade later. However, consider opting for a paid version sooner if your business demands it today.
Start with our free requirements template to create a checklist of your business needs. Match it with suitable solutions to narrow your product shortlist and conduct in-depth research on vendors and their offerings.
Have any questions, advice or insight about free reporting tools? Let us know in the comments!