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.
$295
per single user license
Tableau Desktop
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Desktop is a data visualization product from Tableau. It connects to a variety of data sources for combining disparate data sources without coding. It provides tools for discovering patterns and insights, data calculations, forecasts, and statistical summaries and visual storytelling.
$70
per month
Pricing
SAP Crystal
Tableau Desktop
Editions & Modules
Upgrade Version to SAP Crystal Reports 2020
$295
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2020 64-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Reports 2016 32-Bit
$495
per single user license
SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL
$869
per user license + first year maintenance to be added
SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL
$8,744
5 concurrent users + first year maintenance to be added
Tableau Creator
$70.00
Per User / Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SAP Crystal
Tableau Desktop
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 Viewer allows you to view static data within a SAP Crystal Reports file.
* SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Full version allows you to create powerful, richly formatted, and dynamic reports from virtually any data source, delivered in dozens of formats, in up to 28 languages. If you already have an older version of Crystal Reports, buy a license for SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - Upgrade at a discounted, upgrade price.
* SAP Crystal Server 2020, 1 NUL includes 1 license of: SAP Crystal Reports 2020 - SAP Crystal Server 2020.
* As an add-on to SAP Crystal Server 2020 1 NUL, SAP Crystal Server 2020 5 CAL allows you to support a wider, intermittent audience of end users, up to five logged on at the same time.
Crystal Reports fits a niche for us in standard reporting. We don't use it for creating dashboards or interactive data analysis. That's where Tableau excels. For on-demand reports, we prefer Microsoft Reporting Service and Analysis Services. Crystal Report is very good when it …
SAP Crystal Server stacks up better than Tableau Desktop and Google Charts because we found it was easier to customize and for what we needed it was easier to create the reports. So that is why we went with SAP Crystal Server over the other options that we had considered.
Tableau was a great and user-friendly tool to use for a long time; however, it did not manage various users and their security access very well nor did it provide the level of reporting variation that was necessary at my company. SAP Crystal took some legwork, in the beginning, …
Based on our organization policy we had to use this software. Tableau is also an equally solid software for preparing reports with an upper hand over business users - they don't require any coding experience. As opposed to Crystal Reports, it requires developers to do the work. …
Crystal offered a more straightforward implementation for our situation. While Tableau offers well-designed reports, the overall functionality regarding data manipulation and analysis is behind Crystal.
For automating documents and reports, I personally believe there is no better solution. However, for the sheer fact, it can't compare/combine two sources, I'd recommend pairing it with another BI tool. For example, Qlik, whereby you can create dashboards and compare multiple …
Qlik is better in terms of reading data from different sources but it doesn’t have the auto doc ability like SAP Crystal Tableau. It is a decent visualization tool but doesn’t have the same ability in terms of rendering output reports into a suitable format. Plus the cost of Tab…
Vice President, Chief Architect, Development Manager and Software Engineer
Chose SAP Crystal
We found that Crystal was a little more intuitive to our team members than the other products. All of the products were excellent choices but we liked the ability to code stored procedures to gather our data. While each product has very similar features, we went with …
I found Crystal much more flexible and easier to use for report building than Cognos. Crystal's menu system is similar to Microsoft Word and Excel, so it instantly seemed familiar. I had to do much more hunting in Cognos to modify the properties and formatting of a report. …
I have to use Crystal Reports with our third party software, and it does make the pretty formatting easy, but it's actually less intuitive than the software with less of a GUI.
The presentation level is compatible and is clear and concise. However, there are limits to customize and formatting As a large organization we were required daily to provide reports to our customers for various projects, data and financial information.
SAP has a very sophisticated environment. It is very good to provide interaction in between different teams. I work in communications and to interact with air traffic control there is a good amount of interaction when using SAP. What I feel is that if you have an SAP database, …
Due to its bigger brand and excellent user support, it is better than many competitors. If you have huge organization support, then operating it will make your reporting system much better. Otherwise, you might need better employee support for operating it. Otherwise, the whole …
Excel has some competitive features with Crystal Reports, especially if you have it connected directly with the database, however, it's overall very different. With Crystal, it allows you to enter values before running a report to really compare between different parameters. It …
SAP Crystal Server is exactly what we need for our reporting, both internally and externally, and we consistently use the scheduled reporting option and set up automatic delivery to save us time. These features are the main reason why we decided that this program was the …
As already stated, some businesses may find SAP Crystal Reports too expensive. While there are cheaper alternatives, it will all depend on your business' specific needs which product to choose. Another factor to consider is, what is the product, the majority of your clients is …
When we evaluated several options, we found SAP Crystal Server to be more reliable than some of its competitors. We wanted something that we could customise to use in several departments and for all different types of situations where reports would be useful. We also use other …
We have a lot of clients who use SAP Crystal Server that we collaborate on reports with and this was a big reason for why we work with SAP Crystal Server. If I had to rate all the other analytics programs that I have worked with against SAP Crystal Server I would rate SAP …
If any changes had to be made to existing visualizations when we used QlikView, a lot of security constraints existed and I had to run to the IT team for every change I had to implement.
Tableau gives easy security change rights to the developer environment.
Excel is the ultimate jack-of-all-trades Swiss army knife approach. You can do almost anything but it is missing much of the polish of dedicated applications of Tableau. Great for the initial approach to a new dataset. I have created some custom Excel macros that go in and run …
I have used SSRS, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel, and Business Objects. Tableau offers more functionality than the rest and is pretty intuitive. I think SSRS is the easiest to use. Query speed is excellent with SSRS (at least when you are connected to SQL Server). Microsoft …
Tableau is the only tool that can be exposed to end users so that they can build their reports and dashboards and can publish these without the help of a dedicated developer.
When we eventually looked it up when we realised that it was much better than Crystal reports. It was so much better than Crystal reports there was no real comparison
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
Tableau Desktop is one the finest tool available in the market with such a wide range of capabilities in its suite that makes it easy to generate insights. Further, if optimally designed, then its reports are fairly simple to understand, yet capable enough to make changes at the required levels. One can create a variety of visualizations as required by the business or the clients. The data pipelines in the backend are very robust. The tableau desktop also provides options to develop the reports in developer mode, which is one of the finest features to embed and execute even the most complex possible logic. It's easier to operate, simple to navigate, and fluent to understand by the users.
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.
An excellent tool for data visualization, it presents information in an appealing visual format—an exceptional platform for storing and analyzing data in any size organization.
Through interactive parameters, it enables real-time interaction with the user and is easy to learn and get support from the community.
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.
Our use of Tableau Desktop is still fairly low, and will continue over time. The only real concern is around cost of the licenses, and I have mentioned this to Tableau and fully expect the development of more sensible models for our industry. This will remove any impediment to expansion of our use.
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.
Tableau Desktop has proven to be a lifesaver in many situations. Once we've completed the initial setup, it's simple to use. It has all of the features we need to quickly and efficiently synthesize our data. Tableau Desktop has advanced capabilities to improve our company's data structure and enable self-service for our employees.
When used as a stand-alone tool, Tableau Desktop has unlimited uptime, which is always nice. When used in conjunction with Tableau Server, this tool has as much uptime as your server admins are willing to give it. All in all, I've never had an issue with Tableau's availability.
Tableau Desktop's performance is solid. You can really dig into a large dataset in the form of a spreadsheet, and it exhibits similarly good performance when accessing a moderately sized Oracle database. I noticed that with Tableau Desktop 9.3, the performance using a spreadsheet started to slow around 75K rows by about 60 columns. This was easily remedied by creating an extract and pushing it to Tableau Server, where performance went to lightning fast
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.
I have never really used support much, to be honest. I think the support is not as user-friendly to search and use it. I did have an encounter with them once and it required a bit of going back and forth for licensing before reaching a resolution. They did solve my issue though
It is admittedly hard to train a group of people with disparate levels of ability coming in, but the software is so easy to use that this is not a huge problem; anyone who can follow simple instructions can catch up pretty quickly.
The training for new users are quite good because it covers topic wise training and the best part was that it also had video tutorials which are very helpful
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!
Again, training is the key and the company provides a lot of example videos that will help users discover use cases that will greatly assist their creation of original visualizations. As with any new software tool, productivity will decline for a period. In the case of Tableau, the decline period is short and the later gains are well worth it.
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.
If we do not have legacy tools which have already been set up, I would switch the visualization method to open source software via PyCharm, Atom, and Visual Studio IDE. These IDEs cannot directly help you to visualize the data but you can use many python packages to do so through these IDEs.
Tableau Desktop's scaleability is really limited to the scale of your back-end data systems. If you want to pull down an extract and work quickly in-memory, in my application it scaled to a few tens of millions of rows using the in-memory engine. But it's really only limited by your back-end data store if you have or are willing to invest in an optimized SQL store or purpose-built query engine like Veritca or Netezza or something similar.
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.
Tableau was acquired years ago, and has provided good value with the content created.
Ongoing maintenance costs for the platform, both to maintain desktop and server licensing has made the continuing value questionable when compared to other offerings in the marketplace.
Users have largely been satisfied with the content, but not with the overall performance. This is due to a combination of factors including the performance of the Tableau engines as well as development deficiencies.