Reporting tools are essential in the company with the increasing demand for data and reporting. I listed the 20 best reporting tools you can’t miss in 2021, from free and open-source, to commercial and enterprise-scale, which covers professional enterprise reporting software, BI suite with reporting capabilities, marketing reporting platforms, financial reporting systems. I highlighted these solution’s benefits, disadvantages, price, and suitable users in this reporting tools list. In the end, you can review the comparison of these reporting tools. Also, I summarized a guideline for you to choose the right reporting tool.

Welcome to take full advantage of it!

List of Best Reporting Tools

Professional Enterprise Reporting Software

1.FineReport

2.JasperReports

3.Izenda

4.Crystal Reports 

5.Cumul.io

BI Suite with Reporting Capabilities 

6. Tableau

7. Yellowfin

8. BOARD

9. Zoho Analytics

10.Sisense

Platforms Specialize in Marketing Reporting

11. Google Analytics

12. Agency Analytics

13. TapReports

14. Supermetrics

15. DashThis

Financial Reporting Tools

16. Host Analytics

17. insightsoftware

18. Prophix Software

19. Quickbooks

20. Sage Intacct

Before reviews, let’s start with some basic definitions of reporting tools.

What are the reporting tools?

Reporting tools allow you to extract and dynamically present data in the form of charts, tables, and other types of visualizations so users can translate data into actionable information and discover insights. In other words, you can view reporting software as various styles+ dynamic data.

It also allows you to navigate the report through various hierarchies and visualization elements. The generated dynamic reports allow you to drill down through various data levels at the click of a button. You can also navigate, sort, filter, and view the data for your specific needs. 

Generally, there are two types of reporting software. 

One is the reporting software that mainly deals with the fixed report. When creating the fixed reports, the IT department will first define the picking-number formula and arithmetic logic. The background covers complex operations. Business people can view, add, delete, or change the data on the web in the foreground. It does not involve the modification of the report structure. The fixed report is the most common in daily report development. This type of reporting tool is suitable for IT departments and reports developers in different departments. 

Another type of reporting tool is working as the BI tools’ function, which is called self-service reporting.  Business people can drag the fields to create the reports without predefined structure. It can deal with simple temporary queries. This type of reporting tool is suitable for data analysts or business analysts. The emergence of self­-service reporting capabilities has driven the levels of interactivity even further by giving the power to create and edit reports directly to decision-makers, further empowering them to drive businesses forward while decreasing the workload on developers and report developers.

Excel VS Reporting Tools

Excel is still the most popular software that companies use it for making reports. People who often deal with reports know that it is very troublesome to use Excel as a reporting tool.  

First, generating reports manually is easy to make errors and is time-consuming. Second, it’s hard to detect problems in Excel in real-time. Once the data is wrong, the query in Excel takes a lot of time. But with reporting tools, you can understand the data information through simple queries with the widgets. Finally, Excel spreadsheets are presented in very few ways. Although some of the Excel spreadsheets’ features are now much improved, they still lag behind reporting tools.

 Click here to explore more similarities and differences between excel and the reporting tool.

BI Software VS Reporting Tools

There are many BI software with data reporting capabilities. Many people confuse reporting software with BI software, but they are different. 

In conclusion, a reporting tool is mainly for data display, while a BI tool emphasizes data analysis. 

As mentioned above, reporting tools are primarily for IT departments or report developers. They use reporting software to make data reports and chart reports and electronic invoices, process sheets, receipts, etc. These show you past and current status.  

Business intelligence software is primarily for business people and data analysts. The essence of BI software is ‘data+business understanding’. The ‘data’ part is like the reporting software, which is statistics and presentation of data. ‘Business understanding’ means realizing in-depth data analysis and smart data forecasts via BI functions such as OLAP analysis, data mining, and so on. It tells you why the statuses are the way they are and how to improve performance moving forward.  

However, in terms of reports, BI software is weak in the richness of report styles, chart diversity, and print function. 

Take FineReport as an example. As reporting software, FineReport provides three reports: General Report, Aggregation Report, and Dashboard. Among them, the aggregation report allows users to drag&drop the aggregation blocks to create irregular reports. Users can also export or print the reports to different formats such as Excel, Word, and PDF. These particular functions make reporting tools distinctive in reporting.

An In-depth Review of These Reporting Tools

1.FineReport

FineReport is a reporting tool developed by 100% java, designed for enterprises to deal with the demands for various, frequent, and complex reports. The basic features such as broad databases support, scheduling reports, multiple exporting formats, security guarantees satisfy the business needs. The low-code and excel-like designer is user-friendly for non-technical users.

Compared to other reporting tools, the stunning feature you can’t miss is data entry supports writing data back to the database via online forms. In this way, it is time-saving to collect fresh data around different branches or departments.

On top of that, as an enterprise-scale reporting software, FineReport provides rich APIs for customizing and integrating with other applications. Therefore, it is flexible to seamlessly integrate with third parties such as CRM, OA, ERP, etc.

Plus, the data visualization package offers a wide variety of visualization options such as 3D charts, maps, GIS relationships, dashboards.

Highlights: easy-to-use, query reports, convenient data entry, rich APIs, mobile and Tv display

Price: Free for personal use without time and features limit. When beyond two users, pay for the functions you need.

Best for: IT departments and report developers with flexible and professional reporting needs

Free Download

2.JasperReports

JasperReports Library is an open-source and java based reporting tool. 

It can be embedded into any Java application because this reporting engine is written entirely in Java. 

You can run JasperReports standalone or plug it into your app’s classpath to make it become part of the hosting application. 

JasperReports shines on sharability, which supports ten file exporting formats, including PDF, Excel, and HTML for fully interactive web content. 

Besides, it supports printing ready reports and automatically emailing the reports.

However, as open-source software, the learning cost is high for non-technical users, and some features are not very intuitive. The flexibility is another disadvantage, it just can be embedded into Java applications, and the integration cost lots of work. 

Highlights: customizable open-source architecture, runs anywhere

Price: The product is free, while the help documentation is commercial.  

Best for: Java developers who want to add reporting capabilities to their applications. 

3.Izenda

Izenda is an embedded analytics reporting system designed to deliver self-service to end-users and report creation directly within applications or portals. 

Users can build charts and grids, add filters, and include drill-downs from inside their applications. And it is easy to create ad-hoc reports, dashboards, and visualizations on its drag and drop interface. 

Additionally, thanks to its 3-tier embedded architecture with an open-source front end, Izenda supports seamless integration with Ruby, Python, Java, .NET, PHP, and other applications. 

The only limitation is that advanced reports and dashboards require a strong background in SQL. 

Highlights: Ad-hoc reporting, embedded analytics, self-service reporting tool

Price: start from $12000.00/year

Best for: IT departments who are looking for an embedded reporting solution

4.Crystal Reports 

SAP crystal reports is an on-premise reporting tool for SQL. It is perfect in its pixel reporting capabilities. The system is fully featured and allows a great deal of flexibility in customizing reports.

The software supports hundreds of source connections that you can build reports from everywhere – big data, Excel, XML, data from Salesforce, etc.

Crystal Reports should be on your list if you have international branches that will require reporting in languages other than English because it supports to deliver the output in over a dozen formats, in 28 languages.

But it requires a proprietary language and technical know-how to build attractive reports. And the reviews indicate that it might often crash after a software update. 

Highlights: pixel reporting, support 28 languages 

Price: $495.00/one-time/user, no free version but a free trial 

Best for: small to medium-sized business reporting needs  

5.Cumul.io

Cumul.io provides a SaaS platform for building reports and dashboards 

in your own software application or customer portal.

It is a good option for SaaS companies & enterprises who value data-driven insights but don’t want to waste time developing a dashboard component from scratch. 

The ease of use and the very small learning curve made it possible for non-tech users to jump right into visualizing the data.

Additionally, as a SaaS reporting system, Cumul.io offers connectors to data in the cloud like Google Drive and applications like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, Salesforce, and Teamleader. 

However, the visual features could be improved.

Highlights: ease of use, fully integrate, support cloud data connection

Price: starts at $275/month

Best for: companies who have a SaaS platform

6.Tableau

Tableau is the most popular BI tool, with shining reporting and visualization capabilities. 

It offers a powerful visualization engine and an easy-to-use interface to quickly turn data into impressive charts, reports, and dashboards. Additionally, the software provides hundreds of visualization customization options and interaction techniques at users’ disposal.

On top of that, Tableau has a thriving community and forum where you can find numerous videos, guides, and tips.

The only advantage is the cost is high, and the flexibility is low that it is difficult to customize or embedded into companies’ IT landscape.

Highlights: ease of use, competitive visualization effects, unrivaled community

Price: Quote based 

Best for: business analysts with analytics needs 

7.Yellowfin

Yellowfin is an innovative BI and data reporting platform that combines visualization, machine learning, and collaboration. It is stunning in the storytelling capabilities, which help readers drill into the detail and get behind the numbers to make 

Yellowfin Signals help discovers and sends automatic alerts about critical signal changes in the business via automated AI-driven techniques. 

As a reporting tool, the Yellowfin Story and Present feature support building management and financial reports and presentations conveniently with a single source.

However, the limitations are it does not support integrating with various platforms like Quickbooks, SAP. And the only available language is English. 

Highlights: action-based dashboards, automated business monitoring, data-rich presentations, and interactive reports.

Price: Quote based

Best for: enterprises with analytics needs

8.BOARD

BOARD is a self-service reporting tool that combines the BI tools and the reporting capabilities in a single system. 

This software’s key idea is all-in-one that offers a unified architecture for BI, reporting, analytics, and performance management. And the “ALL IN ONE” design allows you don’t need another tool to make your CPM environment.

BOARD provides a wide variety of data import options, and its capability of “slice and dice” data, analyze different datasets is powerful. 

Additionally, you can get back reports through spoken language thanks to the NLR/NLG technologies. 

The disadvantages are its limited performance of the Excel add-in may cause some crashes, and it only can be installed on Mac.

Highlights: “All-in-one” design includes performance management 

Price: Quote based 

Best for: small-to-midsize organizations with analytics needs

9. Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a SaaS business intelligence software with one of the most powerful reporting modules. The formerly is Zoho Reports.

The software is best for the non-tech savvy. It’s incredibly easy to generate reports from any data on its intuitive interface.

Zoho Analytics offers AI, ML, and NLP technologies for augmented analytics, called Zia, allowing users to extract data just by entering a simple question.

Additionally, it supports 500+ out-of-the-box integrations for your business apps, including popular marketing, financial, ecom analytics apps. And the data can be imported from databases even behind firewalls.

The cons are limitation on the number of email addresses while scheduling reports is restricted, and the updates are not well documented. 

Highlights: 500+business applications integration, easy-to-use, augmented analytics

Price: $22-$445/monthly depending on the users and data amount, 15 days free trial.

Best for: CXOs, sales managers, analysts, consultants 

10.Sisense

If you are searching for a big data reporting solution that uses machine learning and has automation features, Sisense will be a good choice. 

Sisense is an agile business analytics platform that provides end-to-end reporting solutions. It equips end-users with the insights they need via real-time reports.

On that note, the in-chip architecture of Sisense accelerates the time it takes in data ingestion, cleaning, and report generation. And it offers Visual ETL and UI for data relationships and modeling with ETL. 

You can install Sisense in a private cloud, on-premises, or choose a hybrid deployment using Windows or Linux. The deployment process is fast and straightforward.

However, reviews indicate that there are some unknown issues in widgets, dashboards, filters. Besides, Cube’s management logic is growing old. It needs a revamp, more languages supported, and a more advanced fault-tolerant incremental build mechanism.

Highlights: in-chip architecture, hybrid-cloud platform, easy deployment

Price: Quote-based

Best for: CXOs, sales managers, analysts, consultants

11.Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most robust web-based reporting tools designed to track users’ behavior in digital marketing. 

The entry-level version is free, but it is powerful enough to monitor campaign performance, such as traffic acquisitions, referrals, and user interactions. Therefore, you can adjust your content or channel strategy timely according to the real-time data. 

It’s straightforward to deploy as long as you have backend access to your website. And the interface is user-friendly enough for any non-tech users to maximize the value of this platform. 

Besides, you can export the traffic reports into Excel, PDF, and Google sheet. Or set a scheduled email to share the reports with your team or clients. 

On top of that, the Analytics Intelligence feature informs you of insights you might ignore. For example, when your web page took significantly longer to load, Google Analytics will alert to let you improve your website. 

Highlights: free, analytics intelligence feature

Price: the basic version is free

Best for: marketing team to track users’ behaviors and customers’ interactions with websites 

12.Agency Analytics

Agency Analytics is a marketing campaign focused report generator for generating reports and dashboards for SEO auditing and monitoring campaigns. It emphasizes helping digital marketing agencies build automated reports for clients.

Because AgencyAnalytics offers more than 50 marketing platforms integration. You can put multiple campaigns from various channels in the same place to get the whole picture. 

Besides, your marketing team can take advantage of its SEO tracking features like rank tracking, site audits, and backlinks to develop SEO reports.

Last but not least, Agency Analytics’ system supports uploading your logo, apply your brand’s color scheme, and use your own domain. It is user-friendly to generate customer-facing reports. 

However, you can’t see the competitors’ backlinks in the backlink section.

Highlights: auto reporting, 100% brandable, 50+ marketing integrations

Price: $49-$399/monthly, 14 days free trial 

Best for: marketing agency or departments with the marketing campaign needs

13.TapReports

TapClicks offers a set of marketing solutions that streamline and automate the marketing process. TapReports is a part of the TapClicks suite that puts an emphasis on reporting tasks, which allows agencies to manage communication with their clients and generate customizable marketing reports for their clients.

TapReports provides more than 100 data connectors to pull in data quickly without a support team or IT pro, offering users aggregated marketing data and omnichannel visual reports in a short time. 

Besides, TapReports offers an online working space for multiple users to collaborate and work on campaigns together. Clients or the marketing team can add input and share feedback simultaneously, helping with a campaign organization. 

If you want to leverage report generation tools for automatic digital marketing reporting, TapReports will be a good choice.

Highlights: convenient collaboration, automated reporting, a large library of data connectors

Price: Available upon request

Best for: marketing agencies with creating branded reports from omnichannel for clients’ campaign 

14.Supermetrics

Supermetrics is a cloud-based reporting tool designed for digital marketers who work with marketing data to deal with PPC, SEO, social, and web analytics.

You can compare traffic, conversion rate, and CPC across your campaigns on a single dashboard with cross-platform reporting modules.

The automation is the best impressive Supermetrics feature. It continually scrubs each connected marketing platform you have to pull real-time data. You can set emailing your reports weekly, monthly, or quarterly based on your needs.

Therefore, you don’t have to check the platform. The only you need to do is schedule reports to be collected, curated, and sent straight to your inbox.

The lack of storage and scalability are Supermetrics’ weaknesses. 

Highlights: very speedy, the cost of entry is relatively low, automated marketing reports.

Price: depends on the modules you choose, provides a 14-day free trial.

Best for: smaller teams that are just getting started with marketing analytics

15.DashThis

DashThis is a more data-visualization focused reporting system compared to other marketing reporting software. In addition to custom URLs and an entirely customized white-label dashboard, this software offers nine widget chart types and advanced widget editing to generate appealing dashboards and reports that looks like you made it yourself.

You can also leverage the 50+ preset dashboards templates to speed up your reporting. Just choose a template, select your periods (monthly reports, quarterly reports, etc.), plug in your data, and you’re good to go! 

Like other competitors, DashThis supports a ton of platform integration, including Instagram, Ahrefs, Moz, etc. 

Highlights: visually appealing, highly customizable dashboards, 50+ preset reports templates

Price: $33-$499/month, depends on the number of dashboards.

Best for: marketing agencies or departments who need creating custom marketing reports

16.Host Analytics

Host Analytics is a cloud financial planning and analysis system designed for budgeting, planning, reporting, forecasting, and more.

In terms of reporting, Host Analytics offers advanced formatting capabilities to support the production of presentation-quality financial and management reports. 

Besides, the ad-hoc analysis in Host Analytics is flexible; you can point-and-click to drill into the data to find in-depth insights. 

The reports are accessible anywhere once the reports are created in Excel. 

Don’t worry about data security. By relying on the Planful platform, the software ensures data security, data integrity, and a full audit trail.

The pro is Modeling and PCR needs to be in touch to ensure accurate, up-to-date reporting.

Highlights: flexible ad-hoc analysis, ensure data security 

Price: Available upon request 

Best for: companies have demand for finance automate processes

17.insightsoftware

insightsoftware provides finance-owned solutions that include a reporting tool to accelerate time-critical processes to find and fix issues fast with flexible, real-time, drill-able reporting.

 It also allows you to drag and drop the data you want to analyze and create sophisticated business intelligence dashboards directly in Excel with minimal effort.

Instead of spending a number of hours copying and pasting financial data into Excel adds up, insightsoftware directly integrates into your backend ERP and EPM software systems. In this way, it is easy to use and implement the out-of-the-box financial reporting software solutions, you can get fast access to accurate data in hours.

It also allows you to filter on many more fields and drag additional fields onto the report to answer common questions, such as revenue trends, vendor spending, Capex spending, daily cash flow tracking, weekly forecasting, etc. 

Highlights: interactive ad hoc visualizations, KPI dashboards, executive storyboards.

Price: quote based

Best for: need help creating financial reports from Excel

18.Prophix Software

When you start to involve more company members in reporting processes, you need the right tools to capture powerful insights behind the numbers. 

Prophix is a financial management system used for financial consolidation, budgeting, analysis, planning, and management reporting.

It can be deployed both in the cloud and on-premises.

Prohix’s performance reporting tools enable you to boost productivity and collaboration, facilitate efficiencies, and incite decision making.

The solution provides a spreadsheet-style interface that helps users to analyze financial data and organize information. 

Compared to other financial reporting tools, Prohix SOftware is more collaboration-oriented. You can supplement your reports with cell comments, line item details, and row notes to add the crucial information needed for business success.

Highlights: support documentation and commentary to data, drill-down reports

Price: Available upon request, provide a free trial 

Best for: companies need to automate and integrate their budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and planning.

19.Quickbooks

Quickbooks is an accounting and reports writing software that helps small to large enterprises manage expenses, projects, invoices, reports, and more.

In terms of reporting, Quickbooks provides 200+ built-in templates for customizing, where you can apply filters, adding or moving data points, or adding custom fields to save your time in writing finanical reports, including balance sheets, cash flow, and profit and loss statements.

Highlights: 650+ integrations, Good tax support, advanced invoicing features

Price: Start from $25 per month

Best for: small businesses seeking accounting software suitable to their size.

20.Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is a cloud-based financial management and accounting software that offers flexible analysis and real-time reporting tool.

Sage Intacct’s financial reports allow you to quickly slice-and-dice the details that matter to all key stakeholders, including investors, executives, sales, finance, and other departments. 

And when questions arise, you can dive deeper with custom reports, dashboards, or visualizations to find the answers for confident decision-making.

Besides, Sage Intacct’s innovative general ledger covers ten dimensions to capture the business context of your transactions, operational measures, and budgets. In this way, you can quickly access or create reports that analyze real-time business performance by business drivers – without managing a complex account chart.

Highlights: general ledger, native cloud technology, real-time visibility, and insights

Price: available upon request

Best for: companies need to automate and integrate their budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and planning.

Comparison Of The Best Reporting Tools List In 2020

Is this reporting tools list helpful to you? To help you better compare this reporting software, choose the best reporting software for you. I made a table for you!

[ninja_tables id=”9193″]

How to choose the right reporting tool?

If you still be overwhelmed with the array of choices. You can follow the guide we summarized for choosing one from good enterprise reporting tools. Hope this will help you make your decision as easy as possible.

1. What types of data sources does it support?

A good reporting tool should support the most common databases. It includes mainstream relational databases: Oracle, SqlServer, MySql, DB2, Sybase, Access, Derby, Postgre or Informix.

Besides, it is better if it supports the use of data in Excel, Txt or XML documents, BI multi-dimensional databases such as Essbase, SSAS, SAP, HADOOP, or other data sources including stored procedures, SAP data sources, and heterogeneous data sources. The more data sources the reporting tool supports, the easier when we use it. 

As we know, the enterprise data is from how many different systems and more complex data will be used in the future.

2. How easy is it to use the report designer?

We all want to design a report as quickly as possible. This based on how easy is the report designer to learn and how easy is it to use. It’s wonderful if we only use a little or no coding. An Excel-based interface will help a lot if you want to save time and let your customer create reports by himself without IT help. Anyone who used Excel before can be a quick learner. 

3. Does it support the complex report and rich visual effects?

Inevitably, some complex reports incorporate different sections or sub-sections, combining different report types and formats. 

An excellent reporting tool must support it and makes it easy work.

Also, rich tables, graphs, and charts must be supported to display complex data, making it easier to read.

4. Does the reporting tool support mobile devices?

Many people would agree that we’ve just entered the “post-PC” era. We are soon going to be surfing almost exclusively on our smartphones and tablets. 

Mobile Application can make us check the report anywhere at any time, periodically send reports we want and can warn us if an emergency happens.

5. What types of export and printing formats does it support?

Exporting report is a convenient way to share or do more in-depth analysis. So, it is important that the reporting software can support exporting .pdf, Word, Excel, .txt, .svg, images, or other formats. 

Printing the reports is also a common demand. We want to use an easy way to print and get high accuracy. Therefore, a wide variety of print controls, including page-break printing, scale printing, silent printing, or offset printing, is also needed to meet different print requirements.

6. Is the reporting software an open application?

An open application means flexible customization. 

The open reporting software lets developers use web scripts or API interfaces for deep development and control. And if it can support plug-in development, there will be rich and amazing functions of reporting systems you build.

Click here to download FineReport for free use. And you can also follow FineReport Reporting Software on Facebook for more information!