Overview
What is SAP Crystal?
SAP Crystal is an analytics and reporting software solution for SMBs. SAP Crystal comprises Crystal Reports for pixel-perfect reporting, and SAP Crystal Server for automated distribution and self-service access to reports, dashboards and data exploration.
It's a great reporting tool for your business!
A essential tool for accurate report export from SAP
SAP Crystal Report Review
SAP Crystal is excellent for report building and aggregations
Crystal Clear Formatted Reports in Secure environment with sharing/distribution capabilities.
First time caller, long time user.
Effective for financial reporting, which is accurate.
SAP Crystal overall satisfaction
Crystal Delivers Thousands of Reports Per Week
Decent reporting tool
SAP Crystal Reports review
Powerful document and report automation
SAP Crystal Review
One of my top rated reporting systems.
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Publish to PDF (131)10.0100%
- Report sharing and collaboration (118)10.0100%
- Report Formatting Templates (115)10.0100%
- Formatting capabilities (133)10.0100%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Upgrade Version to SAP Crystal Reports 2020
$295
SAP Crystal Reports 2020 64-Bit
$495
SAP Crystal Reports 2016 32-Bit
$495
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
Software TRAIL DEMO SAP Crystal Reports 2013
SAP Crystal Dashboard Design - Demo video
Features
BI Standard Reporting
Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.
- 8Pixel Perfect reports(111) Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports are highly-formatted reports with graphics and ability to preview the report before printing.
- 10Customizable dashboards(97) Ratings
Customizable dashboards are dashboards providing the builder some degree of control over the look and feel and display options.
- 10Report Formatting Templates(115) Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.
- 10Drill-down analysis(115) Ratings
Drill down analysis is the ability to get to a further level of detail by going deeper into the hierarchy.
- 10Formatting capabilities(133) Ratings
Ability to format output e.g. conditional formatting, lines, headers, footers.
- 8.6Integration with R or other statistical packages(63) Ratings
Integration with the open-source R predictive modeling environment.
- 10Report sharing and collaboration(118) Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration is the ability to easily share reports with others.
Report Output and Scheduling
Ability to schedule and manager report output.
- 9.2Publish to Web(89) Ratings
- 10Publish to PDF(131) Ratings
- 9Report Versioning(93) Ratings
Report versioning is the assignment of version numbers to each version of a report to help in tracking.
- 9Report Delivery Scheduling(96) Ratings
Report Delivery Schedule is the ability to have reports delivered to a destination at a specific data and time.
- 10Delivery to Remote Servers(52) Ratings
Ability to deliver reports to remote servers
Data Discovery and Visualization
Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.
- 7.6Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)(51) Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats are canned visualization types that can be selected to visualize different kinds of data.
- 8.5Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization(75) Ratings
Location analytics is the visualization of geographical or spatial data.
- 7.8Predictive Analytics(41) Ratings
Predictive Analytics is the ability to build forecasting models based on existing data sets.
Access Control and Security
Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.
- 7.8Multi-User Support (named login)(79) Ratings
Named model access means that users have access based on name and password.
- 7.7Role-Based Security Model(78) Ratings
Role-based access means that access to data is determined by job or position in the corporation.
- 8.4Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)(78) Ratings
Multiple access permission levels means that different levels of users have different rights.
- 10Report-Level Access Control(1) Ratings
Report-level access control means that the type of report determines who has access to it.
- 9Single Sign-On (SSO)(38) Ratings
Allows users to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications
Mobile Capabilities
Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
- 8.7Responsive Design for Web Access(60) Ratings
Web design aimed at producing easy-to-read sites across a range of different devices.
- 7.6Mobile Application(43) Ratings
A dedicated app for iOS and/or Android.
- 9Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile(57) Ratings
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
APIs are a set of routines, protocols, and tools for used for embedding one application in another
- 7.4REST API(8) Ratings
REST is an architecture style for designing networked applications
- 6Javascript API(35) Ratings
A Javascript API is a type of API
- 7.1iFrames(8) Ratings
An iFrame is an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website
- 6Java API(35) Ratings
A Java application programming interface (API) is a list of all classes that are part of the Java development kit (JDK)
- 8.3Themeable User Interface (UI)(37) Ratings
A themeable user interface means that a specific visual them can be applied to it
- 7Customizable Platform (Open Source)(31) Ratings
A customizable, open source API Gateway is a fast and scalable type of API
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is SAP Crystal?
SAP Crystal Features
BI Platform Features
- Supported: Administration via Web Interface
- Supported: Live Connection to External Data
- Supported: Snapshot of External Data
- Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
- Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
- Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
- Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
Supported Data Sources Features
- Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
- Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
- Supported: Oracle
- Supported: MS SQL Server
- Supported: IBM DB2
- Supported: Postgres
- Supported: MySQL
- Supported: ODBC
- Supported: EMC Greenplum
- Supported: HP Vertica
- Supported: SAP Hana
- Supported: Teradata
- Supported: Salesforce
- Supported: SAP
BI Standard Reporting Features
- Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
- Supported: Customizable dashboards
- Supported: Report Formatting Templates
Ad-hoc Reporting Features
- Supported: Drill-down analysis
- Supported: Formatting capabilities
- Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
- Supported: Report sharing and collaboration
Report Output and Scheduling Features
- Supported: Publish to Web
- Supported: Publish to PDF
- Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
- Supported: Report Versioning
- Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling
- Supported: Delivery to Remote Servers
Data Discovery and Visualization Features
- Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Access Control and Security Features
- Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
- Supported: Role-Based Security Model
- Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
- Supported: Report-Level Access Control
- Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
- Supported: Single Sign-On (SSO)
Mobile Capabilities Features
- Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
- Supported: Mobile Application
- Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding Features
- Supported: Javascript API
- Supported: Java API
- Supported: Themeable User Interface (UI)
- Supported: Customizable Platform (Open Source)
SAP Crystal Screenshots
SAP Crystal Videos
SAP Crystal Competitors
SAP Crystal Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
Mobile Application | Apple iOS, Android |
Supported Countries | Global |
Supported Languages | English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Italian, Dutch, Russian, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Thai, Czech, Hungarian, Slovakian, Turkish, Romanian, Slovenian |
SAP Crystal Downloadables
- Detailed information for SAP Crystal Server 2016’s supported platforms, such as Windows and Linux OS, browser, LDAP and hardware support
- Languages supported with SAP Crystal Reports 2016
- Product features to leverage with SAP Crystal Solutions for the small to midsize business
- Pixel-perfect reports created with SAP Crystal Solutions for small to midsize business
- Business goals to achieve with SAP Crystal Solutions for small to midsize business
- Implementation costs to consider with SAP Crystal Solutions for small to midsize business
- Comparison of features by version for SAP Crystal Reports and SAP Crystal Server software
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(555)Attribute Ratings
- 10Likelihood to Renew19 ratings
- 8Availability1 rating
- 8Performance1 rating
- 9.4Usability28 ratings
- 8.6Support Rating21 ratings
- 10In-Person Training1 rating
- 8.8Implementation Rating14 ratings
- 8Configurability1 rating
- 7Product Scalability1 rating
- 7Ease of integration1 rating
- 7Vendor pre-sale1 rating
- 8Vendor post-sale1 rating
- 7Data Visualization4 ratings
- 9.2Data Sources130 ratings
- 8.8Data Sharing and Collaboration125 ratings
- 8.5SAP Crystal Pixel-Perfect Reporting5 ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 120)CRYSTAL CLEAR REPORTING WITH SAP CRYSTAL
- Accessible data within our company network
- Easy to personalize data and report parameters
- Works seamless with our database servers
- Sorting edit grid data
- designing seems limited at times
- imaging doesn't always load up to size
It's a great reporting tool for your business!
- It can connect to various data sources
- Quick logins and authorization syncing with SSO
- It may be a bit hard to setup for a new user.
- While it may be hard to setup it has a lot of great functionality that will come in handy once you are comfortable with it.
A essential tool for accurate report export from SAP
There is a good power of customization for end user with the help of SAP Crystal to generate pdf, excel as well JSON format documents easily
- Template Standardization
- Multiple Export Formats
- Automated Interactive report Generation
- Report generation lead time should be improved
- Export options are limited to excel and pdf only
- Frequent updated should be provided
Automated report delivery requires the user to be aware of sql which cannot be expected from all users.
Should support more document export formats and improve the UI for SAP B1 Users
- Aggregations
- Output in various formats
- Multiple data sources
- Summarizing data
- Maybe a little bit more easy to drag and drop/WYSIWYG capability
Crystal Clear Formatted Reports in Secure environment with sharing/distribution capabilities.
- Highly formatted reporting capabilities.
- Pixel oriented perfect reporting for printing.
- Embedding of dynamic images/logo or barcodes for customized reports.
- Easy to share with other users.
- Dragging and dropping the elements into the canvas to fit in pixels is sometime difficult.
- Exporting the report in Excel looses formatting.
- Learning curve of Crystal is difficult for consultants as it's a bit tricky for data connections.
Only in case where you need row columns based reporting where you can see data in excel like formats you should not go for SAP Crystal Reports.
First time caller, long time user.
- Fairly easy to learn the report designer. Even for people without strong database knowledge.
- Ability to reuse existing report components.
- Can design reports targeted for printing (can cleanly handle pagination).
- Can report from multiple data sources without the need for a data warehouse.
- Better handling of imported images from a database. Need to maintain aspect ratio.
- Add option to disable grid lines.
- Changing data source on same server needs a little TLC. Still have to change each table instead of just updating the connection.
- Pivot Table formatting.
- Chart formatting.
- Importing formatted text from MS Word.
- Support for HTML text formatting.
Fun backdoor functionality to be able to execute stored procedures to updated data within the database and provide results without the need to build custom application solutions.
Not very useful for exporting to MS Word for contracts that need further editing. Pivot tables and charting capabilities are very simple when compared to MS Excel and are only used when basic functionality is needed.
Effective for financial reporting, which is accurate.
- Reporting which is timely.
- Timely with financial management and easy to use.
- Intuitive user interface and customizable dashboard.
- Customizable reporting.
- Cloud based and documentation.
- Improve on training users.
SAP Crystal overall satisfaction
- Clean
- Connection
- User-friendly
- Clunky
- Hard setup
- No regular update
Crystal Delivers Thousands of Reports Per Week
- Complex queries are supported through the use of stored procedures. Because of this, we are able to create very complex reports to satisfy consumer needs.
- User-friendly formats are supported and we can display these reports online.
- Running multiple queries without using stored procedures.
- We need to have developers write SQL code. Drag and drop type report creation can be difficult to accurately create without writing SQL. SQL relationships must be clearly defined for the drag and drop to work. This makes sense, otherwise, how would the tool know what the relationships are?
SAP Crystal Reports review
- Clean format for PDF is nice
- Connects to database to refresh queries
- It's quite clunky setting up a page footer or report footer.
- Headers are similarly hard to set up
Powerful document and report automation
- Advanced formulas.
- Producing automated PDF documents.
- Lining up formulas with database fields.
- Occasional crashing.
One of my top rated reporting systems.
All of the reported materials are tweaked, edited, gathered, modified in the system itself. The formatting and the conditional output of the reports are really good and we could find no equal software to this from the perspective of the reporting. All in all, this is a well structured and easy-to-use system with extensive functionalities which can help in crucially reducing work-time by managing some necessary reporting tasks.
- Easy to use UI. Basically, even a non-technical user can learn to do everything in a week.
- The speed of compiling the data.
- Useful templates.
- Easy interface for integrating the data in the system from external sources.
- Scheduled reports.
- There are some specific points in the system which might become buggy or not easy to use, thus, require support.
- A lot of functionalities to learn for new users.
Presentable reports with many integration and visualization options.
- It has many interesting tools and functions when used with Visual Studio IDE. This allows us to integrate many features of the IDE to design each visual element using drag and drop controls to customize reports
- We have been able to make successful connections to diverse data sources including SQL Server, MySQL, local and in the cloud
- You can perform complex queries by incorporating SQL statements
- There are no limits as to the type of data or objects that I can use. I can format the changes, add mathematical and logical functions, also add images configure the color fonts, all in design mode
- There is no backward compatibility with versions of previous reports. Some updates could cause data loss
- New versions take a long time to arrive
I do not recommend it for temporary use or small projects.
SAP Crystal Reports - Still great but slowing down
- Crystal Reports allows us to create a consistent template for all of our reports.
- Crystal Reports and Server allows us to house a repository for all of our reports to make them easy to find and update when necessary.
- Crystal Reports can connect to a wide variety of data sources.
- Crystal Reports can be a little daunting when first implementing. There are a lot of nuances in learning how to truly master this software and it can be frustrating at times.
- There are a lot of features in Crystal Reports that do not always work as expected. You may find yourself searching the Web for how to get the results that you want.
- Crystal Reports does not provide updates on a regular basis. New concepts and ideas may be a while in implementing.
- The initial setup can be frustrating. There are times when you need to go outside of the install package to make it work with particular data sources, etc. It is not always a 100% install.
SAP Crystal Reports good option for the value
- Excelent integration on SAP B1 client install
- Very easy for the user to access / export reports data
- User permissions/controls to enable/disable unwanted users to access the reports
- If IT department has no previous knowledge of crystal reports they will need training in order to start using it
- It would be great to have objects integrated on the reports
SAP Crystal is a life saver
- SAP Crystal is easy to use and easy to learn it makes pulling data out of Viewpoint easy and quick.
- SAP Crystal has a ton of strengths when comparing weaknesses. One of its strengths is the speed of it. It pulls data super quickly.
- SAP Crystal has a little room for improvement in combining data tables and making it a little less confusing.
Efficient reporting tool with endless possibilities
- Seamless parsing of data across different data sources.
- Ability to create sub-records and drill-down feature for granular data analysis.
- Complex queries or SQl statements are done in seconds.
- The export of reports to Excel is very cumbersome and the results are difficult to format.
- The design of reports and the graphical features (e.g. charts) feel quite rigid.
- The learning curve for a non-programmer is incredibly steep, making Crystal a specialty tool.
- Great visualization for static format & precise tasks: For presentation to senior management /ex-co/vendors where concise decisions need to be made, Crystal is a nice choice to slide data into presentable views.
- Diverse data source connect: We have used it to write reports using data from DB2, SQL, Progress, Excel spreadsheets, XML data, Access, and Lotus Notes databases. It can also be used to join different database types together in one report.
- It uses the "recurring bands" structure for page layout which is efficient and fungible for generating different types of reports. Crystal doesn't require that we set up a metadata layer before creating reports and provides direct access to tables and dimensions.
- It is not very user-friendly for learning as during designs and debugging the error decryption is tedious and hard to figure out.
- When using sub-reports embedded in the main reports for different views of the same data sourced from multiple tables, this makes the process crazy slow. This is annoying and needs severe improvements.
- The visual capabilities need to seriously catch up with respect to market competitors. Security is also a concern at times while accessing data.
- Customer support is available 24/7 helping new users embrace and learn how to use the software efficiently.
- The reports generated are usually in many formats from formulas, cross-tabs and sub-reports thereby helping us understand our data.
- Can generate reports from data obtained from any virtual source
- The one-time fee paid per user is a bit high and may discourage small and mid-sized companies with many users not to acquire the software.
- A stable internet connection is required for the software to function well.
- There is no free trial plan of the software and it ought to be available to help in piloting purposes.
Crystal Reports for your business
- Merge and log data very easily.
- User interface is good.
- Different types of fonts and graphs and charts to analyse data easily.
- Hard to learn. It took a lot of time to learn this software.
- Database used as a source is quite difficult. We always have to contact technical team for that.
SAP Crystal Reports for Your Business
- First of all, its design is very good and easy to use, so it does every task very well like box formatting.
- Its GUI is great and can create graphs in reports of any kind very well. We can also share them with anyone.
- Mobile device compatibility
- Text formatting can be done in all languages by the SAP Crystal reports tool, mainly right to left text formatting. It is very useful as a few of our clients are from other countries and use languages which are written right to left.
- We can use our database and queries with SAP Crystal reports too and save our reports in different formats
- As far as I know, it takes a little more time to learn this tool in the beginning. I personally faced a hard time using for the first time and when I teach other junior staff members they took a lot of time to learn it.
SAP Crystal Review
- It is a great application to see data from different perspective
- It is easy to connect with multiple database simultaneously
- It is easy to format and users can use wide variety of formulas
- It is challenging to use the system at first but once you pass that learning curve then it is easy to maneuver the application based on your needs
- Converting Crystal Reports to Excel can be challenging as the formatting gets distorted
- Overall, there are no major issues and it is a great tool
- Deep integration with our ERP solution which provides the ability for the customers to create their own individualized reports.
- The central management console provides a single place to create, import, modify, etc reports.
- Integration with SQL server that allows for comparison to SSRS reports.
- Complex and involved installation provides a lot of custom features but is not the easiest software to implement.
- Enterprise product which includes enterprise sized licensing costs.
- Integration with the ERP can be simple or as complex as you make it, all depends on the requirements.
Old Reliable, as in 'Works great but showing its age'
- Reliable software
- Constant support
- Def not going anywhere
- Its interface, while it's a workhorse, is not going to win any beauty pageants
- Adding graphics and charts to a report feels cumbersome and VERY antiquated
- It shows its age sometimes
Long-time User of SAP Crystal Reports
1. I answer a lot of questions about Crystal in online forums - the SAP Community forums as well as a few others.
2. I train our clients in how to use Crystal, not only the standard SAP classes, but also one I've created that walks through the most-asked questions from the forums and what their solutions are.
3. I personally use Crystal for a number of different tasks, including analyzing data when I do security reviews of clients' SAP BI Platform and SAP Crystal Reports Server systems.
- In addition to linking together tables and views from the database in order to get data into your report, Crystal allows you to write your own SQL queries using an "Command". This feature allows for the use of very complex queries to get data for your reports.
- Crystal can connect to MANY different types of databases. It has native connections available for a number of them, including Oracle, and will connect to almost anything else using either ODBC or (less common) JDBC.
- Subreports, when used correctly, are a powerful feature for bringing additional data into a report.
- There are SDK's available to integrate reporting into either .NET or Java applications and websites.
- The option to export to Excel is very picky about report format to get a clean export. Once you know the tricks for setting up a report for this export, it's not hard to do, but it can be very tedious if the report has a lot of elements. This is the way it's been for years and SAP has indicated that it's not something that's going to be changed.
- Crystal requires that a user knows how the data they're reporting on is configured in the database - it's not really suited for a "casual" user, but for someone with at least some technical skills in relation to databases. This is not something that can or should necessarily be changed, but it is something that potential users need to be aware of.
- Other than new types of database connections, SAP has indicated that they will not be upgrading any functionality in "classic" Crystal. They instead have chosen to focus on upgrades to Crystal for Enterprise. The problem with that is that it requires the SAP BI Platform - either SAP BusinessObjects or SAP Crystal Reports Server.
- One of the major things that's not being upgraded is the Charting libraries, which were last updated in the early 2000's, before SAP purchased Crystal. So, Crystal doesn't have newer chart types available.
I particularly like being able to write my own queries instead of having Crystal write them for me. With this feature, I've been able to do some very complex reports this way. I could have done most of these reports by linking tables together in Crystal and using Crystal's filter and suppression features, but putting the logic in the query means that Crystal is processing less data so the report is faster.
Crystal is less suited for showing graphs, unless you just need very simple line or bar graphs. It's also not really suited to doing ad-hoc reporting for most users because it is more technical than some other reporting tools.