Amazon QuickSight vs SAP Crystal

• Lightweight and serverless BI tool that can be used for niche dashboards.
• Its integration into other AWS Services is one of its most appealing features.
• The low monthly cost is another benefit.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• One of the primary challenges I've had with Amazon QuickSight so far is that some of the reports I want to build use data from different data sets. Instead of being able to put all of the information I want to see into one report.
• Some of our Amazon QuickSight reports only update every 24 hours. It would be great to see that data in real-time.
• I would remove the various time zones from Amazon QuickSight and only use the time zone we are in.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• Employee Empowerment - Now that our Crystal Reports are written and published, all of our team members have access to run the same reports across the company. Previously, there was only 1 point person in charge of running reports, which took a lot of time away from other job duties.
• Increased Employee Efficiency - One of the Crystal Reports my company uses has allowed me to take a task that took 3 days to complete and cut the time down to 4 hours. There was a lot of manual data collection and calculations that were done, which has also led to less errors.
• Accurate real-time data - Since Crystal Reports are very quick to run, we are able to give real time data to our customers rather than maintaining oudated databases in other systems such as Excel.

Read full review