Compare SQL Server Reporting Services to Crystal R

Question

Which of Crystal Reports and SSRS (SQL Server Reporting Services) is better to use?

Answer 1

People, please refer to version of which you are talking about!

For example, the VS2008 built-in free RDLC reporting (the same as SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services) doesn't support binding fields in header and footer, and it is a basic feature!

Now I'm converting a huge report from this VS2008 Reporting / RDLC 2005 to Crystal Report 2008 Basic (which comes with VS2008) because it doesn't have this basic feature.

I am confident that Reporting Services 2.0 / RDLC 2008 (which comes with Visual Studio 2010) and better yet, the newest Reporting Services 3.0 / RDLC 2010 (which comes for FREE in SQL Server 2008 R2 Express With Advanced Services) are better SSRS solutions.

SQL Server R2 Express with Advanced Services (FREE) http://www.microsoft.com/express/Database/InstallOptions.aspx

Right now I am making a Proof of Concept for Reporting Services 3.0 / RDLC 2010, and will post the results.

Reporting Services (SSRS/RDLC) is always more easy to work, but easy comes with a price. For simple reports, always choose SSRS/RDLC. For complex reports with master-detail, page control and so on, please make a PoC of these scenarios with newest SSRS/RDLC versions (2008,2010) and also with Crystal Reports.

Answer 2

For those who are comparing the old Crystal Reports XI and Reporting Service 1.0 please see this 2005 post:

SQL Server Reporting Services and Crystal Reports: A Competitive Analysis http://www.crystalreportsbook.com/SSRSandCR_Conclusion.asp

Answer 3

I wonder why no-one mentioned one big issue with CR - that it just fails in source control or team environment. Correct me if I am wrong but I really looked very hard for any report diff tools. There's one (released about year ago) but it just doesn't do well - not because it's bad but (I guess) because CR just don't expose report structure correctly or something... I tried to export .rpt to XML but it's clunky and wrong. I even tried to write my own .rpt comparer.

It's not about team development only; even if there's single developer it's a nightmare to maintain reports versions, and if your customer decided to add few things or to change few colors, you're now cursed to track every single textbox since there's absolutely no way to find out the changes.

RDL format is much more clean and open. And this can be a pretty major advantage.

Answer 4

I have worked with both CR and SSRS and this what i found.

Crystal Reports runs in its own memory while SSRS runs in the limited SQL Server memory.

Crystal report is way too expensive. Recently they have slashed their price to 250$ i think as a response to SSRS 2008 release.

SSRS is free.

The biggest reason why Crystal report thrives :

You can design 80% of reports in a project using SSRS. But for the remaining 20% you have to use some other reporting tool. These 20% reports are used by none other than top level managers , directors & CEO. Their requirement can never be undermined and CR does a wonderfull job there.

Crystal report is still COM based. which is a pain in the a**.

Crystal report is not lacking capabilities or features. It is the work horse of SAP. But lot of its classes are protected and dont provide access to programmers. This is by intention. The SAP people are so greedy they want to keep every feature under control and charge extra fortune for exposing the claases and objects to the developers under special license arrangement. Just debug and quick watch the ReportDocument object in VS you will know inspite of everything available in the object you can hardly use them in your code !!

As far as GUI & CSS issues are concerned expecting a COM object which is designed for precision printing , to render correctly in every browser is a moot point as even a simple div renders differently in different browsers.

I have been working with Crystal reports since 7 years and cursing it all the time while actively exploring all other alternatives. But i am yet to come across something as flexible as Cystal Report. For bulk of the work SSRS is good. But for Dashboards , Complex Reports with subreports, Balance sheets, trial balances i shall never waste my time in SSRS.

Just try a Google Trend search on Crystal Report. It has been steadily declining since last 6 years. surely the future does not look good for CR.

But Hey ! MS, SAP and ORACLE still endorse Crystal Report at the core of their applications !! and no BI product comes cheap.

Answer 5

I've been using Crystal report till version 10 and was always doing stuff i wanted successfully along with ASP.NET applications. Its output on web is really good like WYSIWYG and exports to Excel and PDF are also accurate. Printing is also marvellously correct.

Recently, i've been working on SSRS 2005 for around an year and have been living to witness so many lackings that must have been provided out-of-the-box too. SSRS web output varies greatly with different browsers and diff resolutions and would easily make a developer sick. Moreover, the scrolling issues with report viewer would make an end-user mad quite early as it is based on HTML using an IFRAME. (Note: Crystal 13 uses an IFRAME in the web-viewer which suffers from sporadic text-wrapping and overlapping issues). The exports are not good at all. You cannot align images left or center in cells and cannot specify background colors for images. You cannot center align complete report body. For possibility, i've played with the rendered HTML for hours and figured out exact replacements to make that works, but these simple fixes were not known to SSRS developers i guess because probably, they never used SSRS for themselves.

Further, in web applications, you need to bear the bad UI for parameters out-of-the-box. I have simply removed it completely and the cost of creating it in ASPX pages made me think to design tabular reports in DataGrids instead using ObjectDataSource and database pagination technique. You cannot layout the parameters to your needs. Bugs in paramters sections postsback complete reports without any changes. Paging with grouping works with a trick, but than sorting fails on complete dataset. For every bit of medium to advanced level of UI requirement, SSRS costs so much of time figuring out that it is simply not possible. As there are less of SSRS users, online community has no good solutions for simple problems. Not to forget the good side of SSRS is its deployment, notifications built-in, caching and configuration side, but no UI to win.

BOTTOMLINE is that i've seen SSRS frustating you just due to the nonresponsiveness of Microsoft Support team when they have to say 'sorry! not now' after a month. SSRS 2008 also doesn't have many of these issues fixed rightaway. Moreover, moving to SSRS' 08 means a complete migration of back-end platforms as well. Keeping the equation in mind that the more you use a software, the more it gets mature over time, Crystal is anyways a much better choice because, SSRS soon accumulates costs for fixing their bugs by yourselve.

Answer 6

I have used both for years. Crystal reports charges way too much and I try to use SSRS whenever possible. However, SSRS does not support firefox or any other browser, only IE, this is a problem. The reports in Crystal look nicer and the exports are more powerful, users want good exporting to Word. If you are a java programmer, I would use Jasper Reports, it is free and uses Java language for functions.