Simple business intelligence tool for scheduled reports

Question

I'm looking for business intelligence tool which:

• is free
• can be deployed on premise (not in a cloud)
• can work with PostgresDB
• allows to create reports simply from SQL query (as spreadsheet or csv), without using bulky & complicated report designers
• supports report scheduling and is capable of emailing scheduled reports

The closest thing I could find was Metabase (metabase.com). This project is still very young and doesn't have many essential features, not enough in my case.

I'm leaving Pentaho & JasperReports community edition tools as the last resort, as I think they are awfully out-dated and too complicated for the task. First want to know that there are no better alternatives...

If anyone came across to any tool matching this criteria, please let me know, much appreciated!

Thanks

Answer 1

I would suggest taking a look at Python plus Pandas

• is free both Gratis & Open Source
• can be deployed on premise (not in a cloud) Yes
• can work with PostgresDB Yes - just about any DB
• allows to create reports simply from SQL query (as spreadsheet or csv), without using bulky & complicated report designers There is a lot of support fo,r and choice of, output format including csv
• supports report scheduling and is capable of emailing scheduled reports since pandas can be run from a simple script you can use your OS scheduler to arrange periodic calls or simply run at start-up and sleep for a set interval and then repeat - python has built in support for a number of email services

Python and Pandas are also both cross platform so you can write your script on one OS and then put it into use on another, possibly developing it on a desktop machine and then moving it to the server when you are happy with the result.

Answer 2

I was on the same boat as you and then I found Metabase.

• is free - Yes, it's Open Source
• can be deployed on premise (not in a cloud) - Yes it has 5 minute installation and it's true
• can work with PostgresDB - Yes it can and with a bunch of others as well
• allows to create reports simply from SQL query - Either you can run your query or design one with their one tool
• without using bulky & complicated report designers - See above
• supports report scheduling and is capable of emailing scheduled reports - I think that's the only thing it doesn't support, but you could have a look or request it on Github :)

Answer 3

I would highly recommend Flow Analytics. Will attach right to Postgres and allow you to fully automate any reporting / bi task against it. The community edition is free. https://flow-analytics.com/blog/build-hypercube-based-business-intelligence-dashboards-with-flow-analytics