We use ComponentOne Studio in some of our custom .NET applications we've developed for our clients. We primarily use the report designer and the grid control that provides features that don't come standard with Visual Studio. These apps are mostly Windows Forms apps. We are a consulting company, so our apps are developed for clients that are in all sorts of industries.

Pros and Cons

The True DBGrid control is nice for showing parent/child relationships and being able to drill down and show the child data. It also is nice for showing summary totals.
The report engine is great for building custom reports for Win Forms or web apps. It can do everything that Crystal Reports can do.
They have a good selection of controls that can do just about anything you can imagine.

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out where things are in the properties of controls since there are so many things you can drill down into.
I find myself using Bing or Google a lot to look up how to do something. Some things are not very intuitive.
Of course, I would always like the price to be cheaper. The high price has caused us to not keep current and have the latest version.

Likelihood to Recommend

C1 is great for creating custom reports. We have client apps where we've created some fairly complicated reports such as invoices and real estate inspections. We also use the True DBGrid in many of our apps since it is so customizable. Its grouping and filtering features are very nice and can provide summary counts and totals at the bottom or right side of the grid that are very handy.

Return on Investment

ComponentOne allows us to add additional features to our apps that wouldn't be found in apps written with just Visual Studio itself. That allows our clients to get more creative in their requirements, which in turn, means more work and billable hours for us!
Our apps appear more professional when using ComponentOne which helps us get projects for new clients.
ComponentOne also helps us to save clients some money since we are not having to develop things that it can do from scratch.

Alternatives Considered

We have been in business since 1992, so we have used many different products over the years. The two other products we've primary used that are similar to ComponentOne, are Infragistics and Crystal Reports. Infragistics has a vast array of controls similar to ComponentOne. We use both to be honest and I'm not sure which one I would pick over the other. I guess that would depend on what you're trying to accomplish and if one had some control or capability that the other didn't. ComponentOne does have the reporting capabilities, where Infragistics does not.