SAP Crystal Reports - A Little Outdated Giant of Reporting
August 13, 2025

SAP Crystal Reports - A Little Outdated Giant of Reporting

Nitin Phansalkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Crystal

I use SAP Crystal Reports to create management reports in web apps. For developer like me it is a convenient reporting tool as it integrates well with Microsoft Visual Studio. For my clients it offers various output formats like PDF, Excel spreadsheet etc.

Pros

  • SAP Crystal integrates well with Microsoft Visual Studio so development is easier.
  • It accepts data in different open formats like XML so it can be used with wide range of data sources like databases or web services or web APIs outputting data in XML format.
  • A wide variety of reporting formats like List, Cross-Table, Master-Child etc. can be designed. Fields can be formatted in a variety of data formats like Date, Currency etc. Grouping, Summary, Calculated fields can also be added.

Cons

  • Installing process needs to be more user-friendly. It takes a lot of time. Finding the correct version extension for Visual Studio is harder than you think.
  • Since it's an old and evolved product, it's stable and complete; however, this has caused it to become bulky and slow in the runtime.
  • "Help" material is not organized properly. You have to search the community pages if you are using some advanced feature like conditional formatting.
  • Being an early mover in web reporting it was a de-facto tool for reporting. But now with other players coming in, it has lost that competitive advantage.
Version for Visual Studio looks neglected with long release cycles. Hard to locate installation files etc.
I recommend Telerik Reports as it is well supported, lighter product.

Do you think SAP Crystal delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SAP Crystal's feature set?

Yes

Did SAP Crystal live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of SAP Crystal go as expected?

No

Would you buy SAP Crystal again?

No

When you compare SAP Crystal with other new-age reporting tools you tend to gravitate towards the latter. The server installation is bulky; runtime performance of the engine is slower.
Good thing is that you can use it with Microsoft Visual Studio IDE (for development) for free. However, here too, locating the right extension file is difficult. If there's a bug in the Service Pack that you have installed, then you are not sure as to when the next SP will become available. This single thing repels me as I suffered from a bug for several months since that was the only SP available with the version of Visual Studio that I was using.

SAP Crystal Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.3
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
5
Report Formatting Templates
9
9.7
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
9
10.0
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
Delivery to Remote Servers
Not Rated
Not Rated
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Not Rated
Multi-User Support (named login)
Not Rated
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
Not Rated
Report-Level Access Control
Not Rated
Single Sign-On (SSO)
Not Rated
4.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
5
Mobile Application
5
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
4
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Comments

More Reviews of SAP Crystal

  1. Home
  2. Business Intelligence (BI) Tools
  3. SAP Crystal Reviews
  4. User Review of SAP Crystal