EazyBI is the F1 Race Car You Don’t Need. Get The Ford Focus.

Know what? We’ll happily admit straight up that as a custom reporting tool for Jira, EazyBI is more powerful than our own app, Custom Charts for Jira. It generates incredibly detailed and interactive charts out of extremely large data sets. The point is, do you need all that power, and all those charts?

Probably not. For non-technical Jira users handling much smaller amounts of data, EazyBI is a needlessly steep mountain to climb. And by the time you’ve hit the summit, it’s often overkill.

Life is complicated enough. For most users, Custom Charts is a much better fit. Let’s use the analogy of a Formula 1 race car versus a Ford Focus to explain.

Who needs a Formula 1 car to get to work?

Formula 1 race cars go from 0 to 160kph in less than five seconds. They’re designed to stick to a race track, with advanced aerodynamics and tire technology to maintain traction. They’re supposed to be controllable at speeds of more than 200kph and take corners terrifyingly fast.

Do you need any of this to drive down the road to the office? No. A Ford Focus will do just fine.

As shown below, EazyBI will let you build a story points burndown line chart showing resolved story points, cumulative resolved story points, remaining story points, linear trend for remaining story points, and an optimal story points burndown guideline. All in one line chart. Frankly, who needs all of that when ultimately teams are just looking for a quick view of their sprint velocity?

Yeah, we’re exhausted looking at this too

Ah, that’s better

F1 race cars and Ford Focuses have different purposes and are for different people. Likewise, we never intended Custom Charts to be a one-to-one stand-in for EazyBI. Sure, they both produce lovely, colorful, and highly customized pie charts, just like F1 cars and Ford Focuses drive. But like F1 cars, EazyBI does a lot more too. That’s because it’s for programmers and developers handling big data from multiple sources, not just your average Scrum Master who wants to show her team a bar chart of their progress.

So the question is, would you rather a tool that lets 10 people make a thousand reports, or one that lets a thousand people make 10 reports?

What we’re saying is that unless you’re after complex big data reporting, Custom Charts for Jira is going to be more than enough for you and your needs. Especially if you’re someone who can’t or doesn’t want to write code, like a project manager, team leader or support technician. Then you wouldn’t be using EazyBI to its fullest even if you had it.

Steep learning curve vs no learning curve

Not everyone can drive an F1 car. It requires time, training, and courage. A Ford Focus anyone can drive. Reviews of EazyBI mention its steep learning curve and how complicated it is to set up and maintain. It’s because you have to export data from a variety of different places, build your charts in multiple admin screens, and understand the Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) programming language to get them looking the way you want them.

If you know exactly what to do on the admin screen below, fantastic. You’re already an EazyBI pro. But most people won’t have the foggiest.

With Custom Charts, you simply open a Jira dashboard and add a Custom Charts gadget. You can then build whatever chart you want just by clicking a few boxes and selecting options from dropdown fields. Easy. It takes, on average, ten times fewer clicks to make a pie chart with Custom Charts than it does with EazyBI.

Just 3 quick steps to make a pie chart!

Be gone, reporting overlords!

The other important thing to mention is that to create the most complicated, fancy-schmancy reports in EazyBI, a company would need to hire a full-time dedicated expert to code them. This effectively creates a ‘reporting overlord’ within your organization — someone who hoards all the knowledge, visibility, and control of your company’s data. Not only does this lead to knowledge and time bottlenecks in day-to-day working, it’s also more expensive (because the programming expertise needs to be paid for) and higher risk (because the expert could leave, plunging you into a reporting blackout).

The ethos underpinning Custom Charts is the democratization of processes that used to be reserved to experts. We want more employees to do more things without technological barriers in their way. That’s why, with Custom Charts, we’ve built an interface that, if you know how to drag and drop, you can start using it immediately.

Although Atlassian has traditionally aimed its technology at techies, most Jira users these days aren’t developers, or programmers, and don’t have master’s in big data. This is why we created Custom Charts for Jira. It’s for the people who have no interest in coding or time to watch a million tutorials, but still want to get more out of their Jira instance.

If that person’s you, you know what to do.