Comparison to Crystal Reports

[rh]

Has anyone done a comparison between telerik reporting and Crystal they can share? I'm in the process of selecting a reporting framework to move forward with and this would be great info. Might be good feedback for telerik too. :)

[Jesse]

I'm not sure how Crystal Reports is faring these days, but we switched some time ago to Microsoft's Reporting Services (of course you need SQL Server).  Reporting Services has its flaws, but not so many as when compared to Crystal Reports 9.0 (again not sure how v11 is).  I have found support and documentation for Crystal to be downright shoddy and their software quite buggy.  I would definitely stay away from this reporting tool if possible.

Having said that though, I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Telerik's Reporting because RS has its share of problems as well.  I'm just concerned that I might have to wait for V2 if V1 doesn't have a full feature set.  I think the #1 feature to compare though is that Telerik has far better support than Crystal Reports did and certainly better support than Microsoft ever will ($$$ per incident - yuck!!!).

[PortVista]

Has this topic been revisited anywhere? I have the same question -- which reporting framework to use? I'm not even entirely sure if reporting is what we need. I have a requirement that involves generating forms at runtime based on data. Examples of the forms generated are proposals and contracts. It's more than just creating templates filled with data though, the structure of the form needs to be highly configurable.

[Vassil Petev]

Hi PortVista,

From your descriptions it seems that a Reporting tool may be a good solution. You can create a report from within VS2005 and then just view the populated report in either of the supplied Web or Win Viewers. Please, download Telerik Reporting and give it a spin - hopefully it will cover all of your requirements.


Best wishes,
Rob
the Telerik team

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[fpsoft]

I'm very curios about Telerik's new reporting software. I have evaluated Crystal Reports, Microsoft Reporting, ActiveReports, XTraReports and StimulReport. Actually i have choosen StimulReport, particularly for their support: to be honest, at now i have had no problems with them.
 
In next days i'll surely download Telerik's reporting solution because i'm very impressed with their web controls.

[Jafin]

Just a quick opinion on Telerik, MS Reporting and Crystal.

Crystal
Support: non-existant.
Product is industry dominent but definately has its quirks,  I really don't like the programmatical side of crystal, their designer has bugs and quirks which, once you are familar with can make the product workable.  I have used crystal for many years and am not sorry to leave it behind.

Microsoft Reporting and Telerik
Grouping these two together as I feel they are very similar.

Both products work well within Visual Studio.

• I prefer Teleriks styling options over RS.

• I like the expanded charting options Telerik gives over RS (Although with RS you can add on the dundas reporting packages which them expands your charting options well above Telerik's, but at a hefty price).
• I find Telerik's ability to connect to datasources easier than with RS.  I primarily connect to an object graph and therefore have little use for dataconnector wizards etc.  I find the ability to connect to datasets in RS a little bit less intuitive then via Telerik's simple approach.  (I do have a question outstanding with Telerik on weather they support deep binding).
• I Love the programmatically access to Telerik's reporting.  I know you can get at it from Reporting Services but it just ain't as painless as the Telerik approach.
• Telerik is a lot less baggage than Reporting services to get going.
  

Things I find Missing from Telerik that RS has

• Web Service to connect to and retrieve report output.  Telerik doesn't offer such service.  But on saying that I don't think it'd be hard to create a wrapper for Telerik to offer this.
• Exporting,  RS has Excel, CSV exporting which I sorely miss from Telerik (I hope they add this soon to their product)
• Scheduling/Delivery: Not really a flaw of telerik, Microsoft  has a full reporting infrastructure that also allows running scheduled reports that can be delivered via email etc to inboxes.  This goes beyond the simple reporting product to a more enterprise level reporting system.
  
• Table layout, RS allows blocking things into a datatable style layout, with Telerik its more just placing controls down and aligning them.  Not a huge issue, actually not really a issue at all.
  

We use a combo of both RS and Telerik at the moment.  Both work well.

[fpsoft]

I have discarded MS Reporting Services because it doesn't have an end-user designer, and many bugs present in the first version have been solved after many months. Too tied to Visual Studio and framework releases and Service Packs, Microsoft is a big elephant in this case.
 
I am going to StimulReport (after evaluating Crystal, MS RS, ActiveReports and XTraReports) because the end-user designer is ok and bugs are removed after days or hours, and forum support is very good. Note that i'm still evaluating StimulReport, not buyed yet.

[Vassil Petev]

Thank you for the great feedback, guys, much appreciated.

Jafin, we just wanted to address your points on some of the features you do not find in today's version of Telerik Reporting. I hope this will shed some light on our future plans on the product:

• services are big these days, and we will definitely consider them once we add the most essential features to our Reporting tool. Our plans are quite packed for the next couple of releases, so you will not see any movement in this direction any time soon. But it is definitely on our plans;
• Export to Excel will be done for v2. Actually, we had plans to include it in v1 as this is an important feature, but time did not permit us to include it. I think that we will be able to add CSV support in v2 as well;
• Scheduling and delivery services are very important enterprize features, however we are still a couple of versions away from full-blown corporate level reporting. Nevertheless, the request is logged in our ToDo list and we will keep an eye on the demand for scheduling/delivery services;
• We really like to have a table item as well. Maybe in v3 we will be able to offer the table layout.

Next week we will be updating our Roadmap with the features that will appear in the next major version of Telerik Reporting. We will be glad to discuss the features that we have planned and promised to add in v2.


Kind regards,

Rob

the Telerik team

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[rh]

Hi, thank you for the roadmap information. For my clarification, when you say v2 are you referring to the Q2 release due sometime in spring 2007?

[Vassil Petev]

Good question, rh.

This week we will release Service Pack 1, which will be marketed as v1.1. Springtime we will release SP2 (v1.2). Version 2 of the Reporting, which will be a major version with many new enterprize features, is expected towards the end of the year or early next year. I will have more details on this after we release the Service Pack this week. The Reporting Roadmap will be duely updates as well.


Best wishes,
Rob
the Telerik team

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[narayanan]

Hi

I am wondering do we have any latest comparision between Telerik Reporting / Crystal Reports / SQL Server Reporting

Thanks for your help

Regards
Narayanan

[Steve]

Hello Narayanan,

There is no feature wise comparison to any of our competitors that we can offer, and honestly such comparison would be pretty subjective if it is prepared from us. Although both products - SSRS and Telerik Reporting have one common purpose and look pretty similar they are based on different concepts and have different pros and cons that you should always have in mind when choosing the tool that would best fit your needs. You can review such comparisons that are made from users of both products in community forums such as StackOverFlow: check this thread.

Generally our suggestion would be to install our product, play around it and decide whether it fits your needs. You can find information on all product features in our documentation and of course if you have specific questions, feel free to contact us for more info.

Kind regards,
Steve
the Telerik team

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