Best ASP.NET reporting engine with custom reports creation ability [closed]

Question

I've worked with all the major reporting tools and each has their plusses and minuses. About the only "plus" on SQL Report Services side is that there's no additional $$ expenditure above the SQL Server license. The downside is that the report designer is probably the most child-like of all.

Crystal has been around forever, some love it, many hate it, it does the job, but has a serious price tag involved if you want to use it for anything other than personal use. And the web reporting server for it is VERY expensive.

ActiveReports, XtraReports, Telerik all have good products and all are being actively improved (at different speeds, of course). Each has a web viewer, but they don't include the rest of the things you might want from a web reporting server.

And if you find you really want an enterprise-class web server option for Crystal, ActiveReports, XtraReports or Telerik reporting (or any other report designer, for that matter), that's now available from www.versareports.com.

DevExpress XtraReports Suite.

A report is simply a class, no web services or rpt files involved.

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/NET/Reporting/

If you have Microsoft SQL Server as Database, so you don't need to purchase License for support of SQL Reporting Services, but there is an issue with SQL Reporting Services, SQL Reporting services only Compatible with IE. check these links ...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms156511.aspx

SQL Reporting Services - Print Button not shown in Mozilla

On the other hand, If you use other than Reporting Services, You need to purchase License.

You can try jsreport. It’s free, open sourced, has .net client, cross platform (nodejs), does not require any compilation and it’s safe to let your users to modify their reports. Reports are designed using javascript templating engines that should give you maximum flexibility for your report layout.

CONS

• does not currently support excel and word
• in preview
• does not talk directly with sql db, but you should anyway send data from your BL unless you are searching for BI reporting

You can try it without any authentication in jsreport playground

Reporting Services is the one I am most familiar with and it is the one most tightly ingrained in SQL Server, which is something that I prefer. I also happen to like the "feel" of RS a lot more than Crystal.

The other two options I am not familiar on at all, and I imagine they have a much smaller market share (and therefore much smaller community when it comes to finding help) than RS or Crystal.

One suggestion would be for you to do at least some evaluation of all these options. The primary reason would be so that you could learn just enough about them to judge how to keep them playing well together.

That way, if you either need to switch reporting engines, or perhaps to use a different engine for some particular requirements, you'll know how to do that.