OpenText Magellan vs. SAP Crystal vs. Sisense for Cloud Data Teams

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

Generation of templated reports is the strong suit of SAP Crystal. Allows users to change formats in templates bases on requirement with minimal effort. 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

Incentivized

Sisense for Cloud Data Teams is suited so well for our project that works with lots of data and needs some ways to share data internally or externally with our clients. It's very easy to pull out the data from the sense in best and in a suitable format and moreover a huge number of options are available there to represent the data. All features of this Sisense for cloud data teams software can be taken advantage of if you have a team who are well versed in data analytics, data management, and programming.

Incentivized

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Rapid deployment of polished T-SQL-based data visualization charts and dashboards. Periscope supports a variety of database technologies, and allows users to write custom queries to display data.
• Included caching to reduce server load.
• Outstanding customer service/support, with expert advice as needed.
• Constant updates and new features.
• Built-in SQL formatters take the pain out of manipulating date/time objects.

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Include more appropriate updates in their monthly newsletter as opposed to the general overview that doesn't always have the most pertinent information at the forefront.
• There are bugs at times when certain dashboards are down, though not in an overwhelming way.
• If you do not tag something it shows up in multiple views and may be accessible to people that it should not be, though that is a user error it may make sense to prompt for a tag and security setting.

Incentivized

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

We have been using this product for so many years and it has truly become a cornerstone to our business processes when it comes to developing and distributing information via reports. We currently have over 500 reports developed to date over about 30 systems and that will continue to grow as user needs change.

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

Crystal is very robust, but not always easy to use. It create wonderful looking reports, and so deserves a high rating. However, I have to take a couple of points off for the simple fact that I cannot hand it to a user and expect them to be able to do development with it.

Incentivized

If you know SQL or are somewhat data-savvy, you'll feel right at home with Sisense for Cloud Data Teams. However, like most other BI tools, it is a little challenging to use for users that are non-technical. The graphs and charts are very visually appealing, and there's lots of customization and export options.

Incentivized

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

The support community can be difficult to navigate. I've also run into issues with my login. The SAP system has a bizarre mechanism for validating users that requires users to have what is called an S-ID. A basic ID may not give you access to all the features in the portal. The limitation may include not being able to perform a simple task like downloading patches and updates. This isn't a big deal for single user license but for teams it can be a pain.

Incentivized

The user interface is just amazing and it's really very easy to use and navigate, even for a newbie. Mostly it provides us the accurate data.

Incentivized

Trainer was patient and thorough in going through the basics and willing to answer questions by email after the initial training

Incentivized

Just like any other implementation: When designing the differing reports, get end users' input, make sure to design the reports so that they display the information that the company requires, in the best and clearest way possible.

Test, test, test, revise when needed, and, particularly, do sufficient training so users are comfortable using Crystal Reports!

Incentivized

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

Crystal reports is useful in case we want to import data from data base . We can write queries in it but Google Charts require to be implemented in our application using code so crystal reports is better than Google Charts.

Incentivized

Google Analytics works well but it does not have all of the bells and whistles that Periscope Data offers. Google Analytics is best used in a Google environment but if you are using other tools and programs outside of the Google universe, then Periscope Data is a much better option.

Incentivized

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• It is a decent buy for specific departments in terms of reporting capabilities but updates and cost (frequent) demands are higher with the benefits offered.
• So long as the requirements are not ever changing, with scheduling functionality, it's a handsome tool.

Incentivized

• Very positive - has allowed us to glean insights quickly and in real time.
• Definitely helpful for evaluating performance of accounts and employees.
• Versatile - we even use it with recruiting metrics, our software team uses it to test feature deployment.

Incentivized