ActiveReports, Crystal, or Other for ASP.NET

We need to make some decisions about reporting tools for .NET, including but not limited to ASP.NET.  I know ActiveReports is very popular, and of course Crystal is common since its included with VS.NET.  I've personally never been a big Crystal fan, but I haven't used it in a long time either, so maybe its improved.  Anyone have any thoughts or experiences with these, or other, reporting tools for .NET.  I would be especially interested in developer vs. end-user customizations, and licensing issues.

10 Comments

  • I absolutely hate the process of writing Crystal Reports but they always look so good when finished and the users/management have no idea how much stress went into them, so they all love Crystal.

    I'm praying for a quick release of the SQL Server reporting tools.

  • Stay far, far away from using the version of Crystal Reports that ships with Visual Studio .NET. It is very buggy and unreliable. If you are seriously interested in going with Crystal Reports, I definitely recommend looking into version 9.0 which is marginally better. Also, like Bryan Murphy pointed out, be prepared to fork over a fortune to pay for licenses with Crystal.



    I have had good success with Active Reports, but it is really the lesser of two evils.



    Also avoid the Component One reporting tool at all costs if performance means anything to you (based on 1.0).

  • Hi Paul,



    I second Kent's suggestion, check out the beta of the MS reporting services included in SQL Server. The UI is integrated in VS.NET and it is quite a decent tool!!



    Best regards,



    Marc

  • Hi Marc,



    You mean MS Reporting Services in Yukon, or it is available for SQL 2K too?



    Peter

  • Take a look at WordML. Server-side generation of Word documents is now very well support - even without having Word installed on that machine!

  • I'd vote for Active Reports. I worked with their AR2 and .Net version and both won my heart indeed. The only thing I don't like much is the Excel output.

  • I'm not getting Crystal as a productive report tool. I have other users creating excel reports that are developed in short period of time and out perform any Crystal report I've seen. My issue is having to tightly couple report parameters in the report. It would be nice to create a template report and have different version based on different user parameters.

    The lack of native support of DB2 database is a huge issue in my office.

  • Wish I knew the answer. I have a product that includes Crystal for .NET, but it is hobbled by CR deployment restrictions. Also developing CR reports is all about knowing workarounds, very non-intuitive.

    ActiveReports apparently has xcopy deployment (which would be ideal for a product designed to be deployed outside of corporate intranets), uses pure C# coding (again ideal), and seems to get better subjective ratings too from users.

    Going to give it a try I think.

  • I use Crystal since vb3 and found at greatly powerfull and without bugs. The only concern now is that they are competing against MS and MS obviously is gonna kill them. Will they outlive version 11?

    I am a novice to Active Reports and could not creat cross-tab. Is it their limitation, or my stupidity?

  • We use Stonefield Query out of Canada...A far superior product when compared to all of the alternatives...SQL Reporting Services is free, but somewhat limited in customization. Active Reports has the worst UI I have used. Crystal Reports is the oldest and should be the most flexible, but they seem to have forgotten the latter part.

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