Crystal Reports vs ReportViewer Pros/Cons? [closed]

Question

We have been designing our reports around Crystal Reports in VS2008 for our web application and I just discovered the Microsoft provided ReportViewer control. I've searched around a bit but cannot find a good breakdown of the pros and cons of each method of producing reports.

I'm looking for pros and cons regarding:

• Ease of development
• Ease of deployment
• Ability to export data
• Ease of support and finding help on the web

Answer 1

Well, I can answer for one side. I have used ReportViewer aka Client Side Reporting. I can tell you its easy to use, easy to deploy and easy to develop. If you can create SQL Reporting Services reports, you can create these. They can take any kind of datasource so you have full control.

Here is an excellent book on Client Side reporting.

There are built in PDF and Excel exports available but you can add your own export handling also. You can use in winforms, Asp.Net in your own services. You can do really anything you can imagine with them.

For Crystal Reports, I do not know much about them.

Answer 2

I can say that the more I use Crystal Reports (and that has been for more than 9 years), the more I want to move away from it. The only reason why you would want to stay there, is if you have a lot of CR reports already up and running.

Crystal Reports is the "one-stop shop" that the user see as the "heaven made" reporting engine and turns out to be overbloated, crowded with bugs and license reqs.

It's very powerful, but at a price; it is complex and not always does what you want.

There are better alternatives out there.