What’s the difference between the Telerik Reporting SDK product and Telerik Report Server? Would I need both and who needs to be licensed with these “CAL’s” mentioned on your site?

Progress Telerik Report Server is a web application for reports management that internally uses Telerik Reporting (Developer SDK) libraries for creating and exporting reports in various file formats. Telerik Report Server adds ready-to-use functionalities like users and reports management, scheduling and mailing reports. The Report Server application can be used as a unified source of rendered documents, where end-users with rights (CALs) will be able to produce more reports for the Report Server and all other anonymous (Guest) users can be provided with a preview or rendered documents.

Report Server exposes API which can be used in external applications after authentication. This is extremely useful for those clients that want more control over Report Server without logging in to Report Server Manager web application.

Telerik Report Server also offers integration with ADFS and Azure AD for increased authentication security and Single Sign-On functionality.

Since 2024 Q2 Report Server is cross-platform—we have a completely rewritten Report Server Manager web application and backend services to target .NET 8. In addition to the performance boost gained, this feat allows us to host Telerik Report Server on non-Windows platforms. Typical scenario is hosting Report Server for .NET in Azure or AWS as standalone web applications or in a Docker container.

If your business does not require a turn-key solution for hosting and managing reports, but just a simple and straightforward solution for authoring, previewing and exporting report documents, you can use Telerik Reporting. It is built around the so-called Reporting Engine, which handles the data binding (i.e. connects to remote databases, web services or local files like CSV or JSON), processes the report and generates the output report pages for previewing in various application types or for exporting in a well-known file format like PDF, DOCS, XLSX, PPTX and more. The Reporting Engine is cross-platform and works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It can be used locally—bundled in an application along with other code or remotely -as a separate web application that exposes a REST Service for generating and downloading the report documents. Telerik Reporting comes with a rich set of Report Viewers—components or widgets that facilitate the process of embedding Reporting functionality in your application. We have Report Viewers for virtually all application types, ranging from battle-proven desktop frameworks like WinForms, WPF and WinUI, to modern apps like React, Angular and Blazor. The last ones have two implementations - one is built around our JavaScript Report Viewer widget and one is built using the native Telerik UI toolsets for Angular and Blazor, providing uniform and consistent UX.