ActuateOne vs. BIRT

Question

I know that ActuateOne adds interactivity and easier deployment to BIRT but the website is very unspecific as to what features/improvements are actually provided.

So I'm wondering, what are the specific features that ActuateOne adds to BIRT and under which circumstances would you recommend to spend the money and buy ActuateOne over using BIRT which is obviously free?

Answer 1

Full disclosure, I work for Actuate. In that position, I am obviously biased, but also in a great position to distill the benefits of the commercial platform over the Open Source offering.

It is the cohesive nature of Actuate One that separates it from other platforms and directions. The ability to produce one design and deploy that single design to a single server with interactivity and accessibility from multiple contexts (Browser, mobile, cloud, etc...). The fact is you can even deploy your BIRT content built in the open source designer and reap all the benefits of the platform without changing a thing.

Once deployed, the content becomes the central artifact in the evolving system. Through interactivity you allow your users to collaborate and add value in ways they never have before. By extending the development paradigm to power & end users, you create an environment where innovation pays near real-time dividends to the entire user population. Users are able to participate in their own application experience without the prolonged request/release cycles that have bogged down legacy systems.

There are a great many benefits that are easy to quantify in list form:

• 64-bit in-memory analytics
• Access to any data source including:
  • JDBC (including many common commercial drivers)
  • BIRT Reports as data sources
  • Information Objects
  • BIRT Data Objects
  • Leveraging existing OO data models
• Integration with any existing security infrastructure
• Dashboards
• Cloud-ready (Private cloud and public cloud via BIRT onDemand)
• A library of 250+ Flash visualizations
• Online (BIRT Report Studio) and offline (BIRT Designer Professional) WYSIWYG designers
• Enhanced Data Access & ETL with Information Objects
• Full SOA-Based stack ready to integrate with external applications on either side of the firewall via the IDAPI
• Geo-spatial applications built with Flash Maps.
• Interactivity through Interactive Viewer
• A variety of output format options
• A common deployment target for all your content. The iServer can host and provision any web-enabled content right alongside the core BIRT content. This allows for one centralized repository powering any number of critical applications.