What are FineReport & Yellowfin?

FineReport

FineReport is an enterprise reporting software with Excel-like interface and drag- and-drop elements, designed to empower companies to generate reports and dashboards. Also, help them to build decision-making platform and gain insights into their business operations. 28000+ informational projects of enterprises have successfully implemented FineReport, improved their reporting system, and increased profitability.

Yellowfin

Yellowfin is an Australian-headquartered business intelligence (BI), analytics, dashboard and reporting software vendor. It develops and markets a suite of products that are used to transform, access, analyze and report on data held in common business sources including spreadsheets, Web APIs and databases.
From a fair and objective point of view, they both have their own advantages and disadvantages, FineReport has a wider range of report style, such as column display and irregular reports, and even can make mind maps, timing diagrams, flowcharts, etc., which beyond the traditional statistical chart categories. In addition, it is more flexible in data entry, which can satisfy CRM scenarios such as user submitting personal information, submitting administrative requirements or operation and maintenance requirements, and sales data input. About Yellowfin, it is more sensitive to changes in data, and user interaction with data is also very flexible. Its platform has an integrated data extraction and transformation module to enable users to manipulate data into a format better suited to reporting and analytics. With this module, it is possible to extract data, transform it and then store the transformed data into a target database. Next, I will analyze them in more detail from 10 different perspectives.

Operating Environment

FineReport Designer supports Windows and Mac systems, and web engineering supports all Java web-compatible platforms including Windows, Linux, and Unix. It is compatible with mainstream browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc., and supports Chinese, English, Japanese, and Korean language systems. Yellowfin supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix, compatible with IE 9+, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari. It supports English, Japanese, and Spanish language environments, and translatable content supports translation into preferred languages.

Data Source

They both support Oracle, SqlServer, Mysql, Sybase, DB2, Postgre, Derby and other mainstream jdbc-driven databases. FineReport supports data sources for big data platforms such as Hadoop hive, Spark, Vertica, Kylin, Teradata, and Greenplum, while Yellowfin does not support Spark and Vertica big data platforms. The specific comparison is as follows
It can be seen that FineReport supports more data sources, including built-in data and excel file datasets. Yellowfin can connect directly to third-party platforms such as Google Analytics, Twitter, and YouTube.

Report Design

FineReport can modify the cell height, column width, font and background color, etc., but you can not see the extended report immediately, you need to preview the report in the browser. It support detailed report, group report, cross report, combo tree report, report pagination display, column report, main-sub report, irregular report, add report background, data format and shape conversion. While Yellowfin does not support background color modification. It does not support combo tree reports, column reports and irregular reports, either.
Combo Tree
Report Pagination Display

Dashboard Design

FineReport supports a variety of layout methods such as absolute layout, adaptive layout, tab layout, etc., but the layout cannot be adjusted on the web side, and the internal components can be fixed in size or adjusted according to the block size of the layout. While Yellowfin has fewer layouts and limited areas, users can only drag and drop completed reports into the corresponding areas.
Dashboard made by FineReport
Dashboard made by Yellowfin

Charts

FineReport supports a variety of charts, such as column, line, bar, scatter, radar, pie, bubble, Gantt, word cloud, and more. In addition, it supports the presentation of data in the form of maps, including regional maps, point maps, thermal maps, flow maps and GIS maps. The most special point is that it supports the presentation of different styles such as text style, title rotation, dynamic display, etc., and can adjust the size of the legend to achieve diversification. This is not possible with Yellowfin.
Legend Rotation
Dynamic Display

Data Entry

Data entry is the most outstanding function of FineReport. It has various of data entry widgets, support for filling in prompts, adding and deleting data, importing data from excel, and even supporting offline data entry and data validation, which is not possible with Yellowfin. Therefore, FineReport can achieve more flexible data entry, meeting the needs of the company’s various types of personnel.

Data Analysis

They both support sorting, accumulation, summary, support percentage, YOY, ring ratio, period, and period display. In addition to basic function calculations, FineReport also supports custom function calculations, which can achieve more complex computational requirements for users, while Yellowfin does not support custom functions.

Exporting and Printing

FineReport has a better performance in exporting data and printing methods, details are as follows.

Timing Schedule

FineReport Support for timing data updates and timing reporting. For data push, FineReport also supports platform notifications, SMS notifications, E-mail notifications, APP notifications, FTP upload attachments, custom attachment handling, and print files. Yellowfin does not support SMS notifications, FTP upload attachments, custom attachment handling, and print files. In other words, FineReport can push data changes in a timely manner in more ways.

Customization Development

FineReport support custom functions to analyze data, support for custom interactions, custom widgets, custom reports, etc. It opens a lot of API interfaces for users to customize the individual requirements, and provided a complete set of plug-in development, installation, use, management solutions. Compared to Yellowfin, FineReport is sure to meet a wider range of user needs.

Conclusion

FineReport supports more data sources and more richly styled reports. The layout between components is more flexible, which can meet the more diverse layout requirements of users. More functions are provided to enable users to have more complex computing needs and a variety of printing methods. Yellowfin BI can use signal to automatically capture large data changes, support report comments, better communication, and a simple task management system. They both have their own advantages, and it is recommended to choose different products according to your personal business scenarios. Next we will write more about the comparison of visualization reporting tool products (Tableau, Power BI), follow FineReport Reporting Software on Facebook or you will miss them!

You might also be interested in…

Data Visualization: 31 Tools that You Need Know Top 16 Types of Chart in Data Visualization How beginners make a cool dashboard?