--- title: SAP Crystal Reports Reviews meta_title: 'SAP Crystal Reports Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 210 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how SAP Crystal Reports works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.2 review_count: 210 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-12' parent_category: name: Business Intelligence url: https://www.g2.com/categories/business-intelligence --- # SAP Crystal Reports Reviews **Vendor:** SAP **Category:** [Data Visualization Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/data-visualization-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 210 ## About SAP Crystal Reports SAP Crystal Reports software is the worldwide de facto standard in desktop reporting. With SAP Crystal Reports, you can create powerful, richly formatted, dynamic reports from virtually any data source – delivered in dozens of formats, in up to 24 languages. A robust production reporting tool, SAP Crystal Reports turns almost any data source into interactive, actionable information that can be accessed offline or online, from applications, portals and mobile devices. SAP Crystal Server enables self-service access to reports, dashboards, and data exploration within a secure infrastructure. ## SAP Crystal Reports Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users value the **clear and interactive data visualizations** provided by SAP Crystal Reports, enhancing their reporting experience. (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of SAP Crystal Reports, benefiting from its friendly GUI and clear visualizations. (2 reviews) - Users value the **easy integrations** of SAP Crystal Reports, enabling seamless connections with various databases for reporting. (1 reviews) - Users value the **extensive integrations** in SAP Crystal Reports, enhancing their reporting capabilities significantly. (1 reviews) - Users find SAP Crystal Reports **intuitive** for basic tasks, enabling seamless reporting across various databases. (1 reviews) - Users value the **friendly GUI** of SAP Crystal Reports, enabling clear and interactive report visualizations effortlessly. (1 reviews) - Visualization (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face **compatibility issues** with SAP Crystal Reports, particularly regarding version requirements and database integrations. (1 reviews) - Users find the **learning curve steep** , requiring additional training to effectively use SAP Crystal Reports. (1 reviews) - Users find SAP Crystal Reports to have a **learning difficulty** , requiring additional training to master the software. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization** in SAP Crystal Reports restricts their ability to modify and enhance reports effectively. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited options** of SAP Crystal Reports restrict their ability to customize and edit reports effectively. (1 reviews) - Users are frustrated by **performance issues** , finding limited interactivity hampers customization and detailed report editing. (1 reviews) - Users highlight **poor customer support** , with inadequate training and high costs impacting their overall experience with SAP Crystal Reports. (1 reviews) - Users criticize the **poor visualization** capabilities of SAP Crystal Reports, impacting their ability to effectively analyze data. (1 reviews) - Pricing Issues (1 reviews) ## SAP Crystal Reports Reviews ### 1. Great for getting the data you want how you want it **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bryan D. | Engineering Associate, Education Management, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Gives the freedom to organize and filter data **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** There is a steep learning curve which can be daunting to new comers **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Able to pull information from multiple databases and create reports and information that filters to what we need to know in a specific situation. ### 2. Functional but complecated to customize **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Textiles | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 27, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Ease of running the ready report and export function, integration with Sage software **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Complexity of customization and creating new reports. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Have someone create the reports for you. perhaps the newer versions are better. i'm running 2011 **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Large transaction retrieval function. I like that you can save the format file and just run it by adjusting the parameters ### 3. Easy and Simple! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** José Alejandro R. | Jose Risso, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 20, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It´s easy of use, no components needed in client. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Sometimes it´s gets a bit slow but mostly works great. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Simplification of report development and integration with ide. ### 4. Powerful Report Writer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is a blank slate. You can pull data out of a database and manipulate it in just about anyway. There is some free support available online too which was a huge help for me because I taught myself how to use it. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Sometimes trying to format the reoport in a way that works well when imported into Excel can be a challenge. Everything has to be lined up perfectly otherwise you will get extra rows and columns which can make things difficult. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** It can be self taught but having some reports to start from helped me understand how it worked. I would have benefitted from some formal training but it was never provided b my employer. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I used it to make reports from our payroll database. Things from YTD earnigns to the report needed to upload 401(k) conrtibutions, Vacation accruals and more. Without it, we would have had to do it by combining other reports in excel which would eventually result in errors. ### 5. Helpful for reporting **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Management Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 24, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Relatively easy to use and it doesn't require for users to spend many hours on training **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It gets slower when using large datasets **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Make sure to become familiar with all the capabilities inclusing the integration with SAP Crystal Server **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mainly sharing dashboards and reports with the team ### 6. Great to get insights **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joe L. | Leadership Blogger, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Crystal Reports has an easy to create reporting software. We use it to pull data from our SQL database **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** While Crystal Reports is easy to use, I sometimes get confused with writing reports. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have been able to easily and quickly write reports to get insights to our shop floor workers because of Crystal Reports. These insights allow us to make quick business decisions. ### 7. Helpful but a tad challenging to use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Commercial Real Estate | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I love that it can pull very specific information from a very large database. You can easily format it to go into an Excel sheet or into a designed pdf. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It has so many features that it is very challenging to a beginner. You definitely need to have someone else that uses it to teach you because the books are insanely large and very dense to read. If you have something in mind though, you can always look to forums online. Everyone else that uses it will become your best friend. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Read the manuals and ask other people. You can't figure it all out on your own. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using it to pull data from our database every month to create specific reports based on very specific criteria. It is amazing when I need to set up an excel sheet or even when I need to create a report that is both beautiful and functional within the software itself. ### 8. Simple method for report generatiom **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Pharmaceuticals | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 21, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Can compile and sort huge amounts of data and databases. Simple and straightforward UI **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Bland UI, takes a while to generate very large reports, requires manually refreshing to see if report is done. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Generation of reports form large databases ### 9. Crystal Reports **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Ability to format data pulled from SQL statements from an Oracle Data Base **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The difficulty in making small changes, cursor is very sensitive **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** The tool is very powerful but I've had some difficulty in building reports , takes an artistic touch to make reports display properly. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows us to build reports for the user community ### 10. Best reporting **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Crystal report UI is easy to use. You could write your own SQL statement within the report. It's easy to connect to different type of databases and comes with different drives. Pretty easy to learn. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The lack ability to combine multiple data source without causing a delay **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reporting needs and deployment. Crystal report.com gave us the web ability without having to invest in the enterprise version ### 11. best software for logistics **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Easy setup to make the software user friendly and have the T codes that you need on an everyday baisis. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Some actions can not be undone. You have to scrap all and start over **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** JUMP IN AND USE TRAINING MODE **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Logistics. SAP helps with planning orders and not over loading shipments based on weight and cube. ### 12. Versatile for pulling reports **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** William D. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The interface and ability to extract and organize data is extremely useful. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Learning to use the software and integrate it can be overwhelming to a new user. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Training for users beforehand is a good idea. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** On the fly business reporting for presentations. ### 13. Good product used with SAP B1 **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Matthew L. | Business Intelligence Analyst, Wholesale, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 21, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Easy integration with SAP B1 to produce marketing and ERP forms for software. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Data source limitations and limited visualizations. Also, combining and joining sources was non-existent from what I saw. Print did not always match preview. Sizing became an issue when creating labels. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Get the latest version to avoid Connectivity issues. Only recommend if you are using other SAP products. Otherwise, there are better solutions. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating forms and reports for SAP Business One ERP Solution ### 14. Review of sap crystal reports **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mental Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 22, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Very easy to use. Lots of interactive charts **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Right now I don't see any issue all features are goog **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it for analytical reporting purpose where we connect the crystal into sql server ### 15. SAP Crystal Reports **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Larla S. | Merchandising Assistant, Apparel & Fashion, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** You can build your own reports to use for current and future use. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It takes a little while to load and export. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I’m running vendor selling reports, store contest reports, brand reorders, weekly item selling, and YTD brand selling reports that I would have to otherwise find manually in a large data file. ### 16. Crystal is a great tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 03, 2018 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I like that I can create the report myself, not just the data that is used, but how it looks and what it does. So much flexibility **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Until you learn how it works, it is not overly user friendly **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** take the time to learn the system. Practice, practice, practice **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Customizing reports ### 17. SCM Crystal Reports Usage **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I like the usability and the how easy it is to export it into an excel spreadsheet. We use this enterprise wise and we have a lot of reports that we share between departs through this program. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Sometimes is can take an extended period of time to load. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use this to run reports on our inventory in various departments across the enterprise. We have them already preset so all I have to do is update it based on each location. It's so quick and easy to use. ### 18. The right tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Micah Y. | IT Director - Gatehouse Central, Newspapers, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Shorter learning curve than competitors and easy to get younger analysts up to speed. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** what's not to like? There are some times that it gets cumbersome with large datasets or multiple sources, but that isn't necessarily a failing of the platform. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reporting and providing end users simple access to mission-critical data. ### 19. Alright **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patricia H. | Agency Support Administrator, Real Estate, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The interface is easy to use, I like the prompts that come up letting me know that I am missing something. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Downloading process was difficult, it wasn't clear where to download from. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our agents are need of reports, and this gives them the ability to have control over what they want. ### 20. An excellent tool for creating BI reports. Simple and Robust !! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Charanya R. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I love the fact that this tool supports most of the data sources. One can even use an excel sheet as data source! Here are a list of few features I love about using Crystal reports: * Ease of creating Summary fields (Total, Aggregate, Max, Min etc.,). Just a drag and drop and you got your summary! * Support various data sources like Oracle, MS SQL server, MS access, Excel and many more. * The "Add Command to Report" feature allows to create most robust, powerful reports --> I personally love this feature the most since it allows you to create better performing reports with respect to response time. * Easy to using Expert options. * The formula fields support both Crystal and basic syntax.--> this is another feature i like. You can either code formula fields using a basic command syntax or a even much simpler Crystal commands. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** This tool is not business user friendly. If somebody from the business wants to create a simple adhoc report for analysis then this is something that's not so easy to use. Business users prefer tools like web-i instead. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to design highly formatted reports that's based on a transaction database. Crystal reports is a tool that's been used for over 15+ years and we are still able to maintain the reports created 15 years back with very minimal changes is one thing that needs to be mentioned. ### 21. big business pays off **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Management Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I think SAP being a widely used service helps find quality people to run the servers; additionally, if you want to outsource it is equally convenient. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** n/a - I have not had many negative experiences with this **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAP Crystal Server has helped with effeciency. ### 22. Crystal Reports **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I am still learning all of the functionality possible with Crystal Reports. I like that I am able to extract ad hoc data from a proprietary database, and tailor the output to my needs. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I have not used Crystal Reports extensively enough to have any dislikes. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am running routine and ad hoc reporting tools to extract datasets from proprietary database with the State of California. ### 23. Crystal clear **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan W. | Superintendent Engineering, Maritime, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Ease of use in creating reports. Ease in disseminating reports via email. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** A little complex when upgrading and downloading **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows data to be deployed to managers in understandable format ### 24. Setup is somewhat time-consuming, but the run-time reporting is robust **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Industrial Automation | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 08, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Configurability, Flexibility. Query ability to bring in data from various data sources. The configurable data fields, calculated fields, special data fields, and database fields are very useful. Querys can be made to force the flow of the reports to have subcategories. The export features of the software to Acrobat .pdf format, Excel format, and other formats make to sofeware very useful. The design and preview tabs are a well thought up report creation environment with a reprt data refreash that allows instant feedback on how the report would actually be generated, when creating a report. Appreciate that there is a support case page on the SAP website, in case there are any know issues with the SAP software. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The data connection setup is sometimes complicated, especially with third party data sources that the Crystal Reports development team have not considered. Crystal Reports now charges to use the run-time in third party applications, such as Schneider Electric ClearSCADA. This is undesirable, because the end customer is already paying for the Crystal Reports software to build the report in the first place. There should be at least a one-seat runtime license for connecting to third party applications allowed when purchasing the $495 SAP Crystal Reports software. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Make sure you utilze the appropriate Crystal Report version for the third party application you will be using it with. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Telemetry reports on real time data. The ability to create scheduled daily reports, exported to pdf format files. ### 25. SAP Crystal Server **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Utilities | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 01, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Easily access and share reports and dashboards from a single, quick-to-deploy solution **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Weak Data Security and data governance,Licensing Model is Confusing- and Costly **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Make the tool Business User-Friendly, introduce the self service reporting for end users not just limited to developers. Improve Data Security and data governance **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reporting data and analytics, dashboards and visualization purposes ### 26. Reporting with ease **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is easy to customize our reports to show data exactly how we need to see it and to alter that for various departments. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It can sometimes,be tedious to tweek report appearances. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use them for a wide variety of both finance and inventory reports. This has saved time and money. ### 27. SAP Crystal Reports **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marty E. | IT Systems Manager, Food Production, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 25, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Ability to create professional reports. Ability to pull data from multiple systems. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Too complicated to teach users. It requires IT development. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reports with data from multiple systems. ### 28. Great Insight **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jack H. | Marketing Manager, Marketing and Advertising, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The things that I like best about SAP Crystal Reports are the fact that we are able to create custom reports and better track our performance and results. The real-time reporting and scheduled reports are a great time saver for us and we were able to save a lot of hours that we previously spent on reporting, and work on more important aspects of our business instead. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** In our experience, SAP Crystal Reports is not very straight forward and a decent amount of training is required before you can use SAP Crystal Reports effectively and efficiently. It is also possible to customize the reports as much as you want, but again, this takes a lot of training to master. We really recommend spending a lot of time on training in the beginning to really understand how the program works. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** I think that SAP Crystal Reports can be very useful if used correctly. If you take the time to familiarize yourself with the program then you are not limited by anything and can create reports for pretty much anything that your companies needs to track. There are a few very useful templates that you can use but you can also customize the templates or create your own from scratch. The real-time reporting and scheduled reports are also a great way to save time **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAP Crystal Reports solves a lot of business problems for us because we are now better able to access results, track spending, track the progress of different projects, etc. ### 29. Simply the best business intelligent and reporting **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** salem r. | CFO, Financial Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 07, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** We love using the ODBC to connect to other databases where other enterprise solutions are storing the data. Crystal reports by far has better reporting than most business software (ERP, CRM). Some of the standard reports are really smart, pervasive and supports our financial decision making processes with intelligence. We also love the idea of being able to nest reports into other reports. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It takes a bit of time to get the hang of it and start building custom reports. Also the CR desktop designer needs an update. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Spend time viewing CR tutorials online as using the solution can be a bit diffecult. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our accounting and crm systems have limited reporting and act as silos. Crystal reports help us report on both systems in a single report, and the complexity of the reports exceeds what the other vendors have been offering us out of the box. ### 30. Crystal Reports takes time to master but well worth it **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** jim p. | Freelance Photographer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 14, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** If you need to create reports and graphs from a variety of data sources, Crystal Reports should be one of the first tools to consider. It does take some time to learn but after you do spend that time, creating reports, even complex ones, is possible in a relatively short time. CR lets you enhance the reporting of many software packages which come with limited built-in reports (instead of paying them extra for custom reports). CR has been around for a very long time, so there are many resources for learning available either books, online articles or online video training. Also, you will most likely find an answer to your question by using a search engine since CR is so well established and popular. CR stores its data in the database, which makes it easy to share, deploy and backup. You can create very professional looking reports without a need to write code. Just about anyone can use it, no need to be a software engineer or understand SQL queries. However, if you are a developer, than you are virtually limitless in what you can create with Crystal reports using its API and 3rd party integration. You can try it for free with their 30 days trial. I think that if you'll spend enough time learning how to use CR, before trying to create your first report, you'll be able to appreciate the package capabilities and judge if it is the right tool for you. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Crystal reports has a steep learning curve and it might take a long time to learn how to create more complex reports, so prepare to spend some time training before trying to create a non-basic report. Technically, I think the graphs can be improved as they feel a bit dated compared to other solutions. The frontend is a bit limited in its design options (mainly noticeable since the backend is so powerful) The vast amount of features added made reports creation a bit too complex compared to what it used to be in earlier versions. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Spend time learning how to use this product before creating a report when you use the 30 days free trial. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Crystal reports allows you to display data from any data source is a more meaningful, understandable and attractive way. It's always much better to display a clear report when presenting information. ### 31. Simplify your report delivery **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeff H. | Owner, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Hands down the best tool I have used to automate delivery of reports and data extracts. Easy to use, feature rich and second to none. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I don't have any real dislikes with this product. My only complaint is the lack of SFTP support. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Don't walk, run to get this tool. It's the best tool you'll have in your tool box for all you BI needs **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complexity reduced report generation and delivery times, this has helped to free up time for other tasks and improved our efficiency. ### 32. The only Reporting tool I use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** chris S W. | Accountant, Accounting, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 07, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Crystal reports makes it easy for me to collect data from different systems and save them in one place to create comprehensive financial reports. I love how the reports builder is user intuitive and simple to use. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I wish if they offered more standard report templates. The stock reports are not enough and if they do offer more standard reports it would save me a lot of time **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Get some training and try it before you buy it. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is hard to combine data from different systems we use. The hardest part is when I need to create a financial report in one platform. Crystal reports is good at combining data sets from different data sources and generating reports as if they were coming from one system, ### 33. Crystal Reports Review **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Perfect tool to provide the well formatted reports to our information consumer users. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Complexity involved in the development of the reports. Still I like the tool **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** End user reports for our information consumers with well formatting ### 34. A great reporting tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Photography | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** If you need to display information in a clear way and the software you are using doesn't have a good reporting feature built-in, use Crystal Reports which can interface with many databases to retrieve and display data in reports or graphs. The customization options are vast and you can get your report looking exactly the way you want with either the built-in options or by using (or programming) a third part add-on. Powerful formula tool allows to built complex formulas (and alter them later if needed) with relative ease. The GUI is intuitive and resembles MS Office including drag and drop formatting. It's a very mature product with a large amount of online resources available. So, if help is required a Google search will most likely assist in solving most problems. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It may not be suitable for beginners and while not mandatory, some programming background is helpful (such as SQL understanding) in order to create complex reports or develop add-ons, Crystal Report can be pricy for individuals small companies. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** If you want to take your reporting to the next level, or working with a software that lacks reporting feature, Crystal Reports is a great tool to look into. They provide a free trial and you can find many free resources online to get you started quickly. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a great option for any type of visual data presentation and a reporting/charting tool for stuff Excel just can't do. ### 35. The software is fine but the customer service is awful. **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 10, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The ability to manipulate and create custom reports for our accounting system. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The customer service and systems in place are both terrible. During the purchase process of a single license I accidentally ordered the wrong product (exact same price as the correct product). I immediately noticed this issue upon receiving my receipt and contacted support to correct the error. I was told that their "exchange" policy was for me to purchase the correct license and submit a software key destruction certification. I did this all within 30 minutes of the original purchase. I waited a couple days and after receiving no response I contacted support again where I was told that it would at AT LEAST a month in order for them to process the "exchange" and refund the incorrect license cost. When asked why it would take so long I was essentially told it was none of my business and they would get to when they felt like it. For a company as large as SAP I am very disappointed in their disregard for common storefront procedures and the poor customer service that goes along with it. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Able to edit the reports I wanted. ### 36. Crystal Reports Saves Time When Generating Reports **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mike G. | Technical Communications Officer, Public Safety, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 31, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The best 2 things about Crystal Reports are its customizability and its compatibility. It works with almost any ODBC connection and I can customize my reports almost any way I want. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The price. It's priced like it's the only game in town because it really is the best option for generating reports from a database. The group discounts do help though. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use it to generate reports from a computer aided dispatch system's data. It helps greatly when our computer aided dispatch system's built in reporting features fall short or when we are just looking for more customization. ### 37. Beginner's experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paula A. | Fundraising and Database Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The navigation bar is fairly easy to use, the report panel is easily understandable. A lot of materials are available to learn how to use SAP Crystal Reports. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The version I used was very old and so it would get slow and sometimes crash. Some of the features of data field linking were confusing and difficult to understand (for example, once a new field is introduced to the export file, the entire report has to be remapped. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Writing financial and relationship management related reports for a non-profit organisation. The reports ### 38. Great application to get data out to users and customers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The flexibility to do various jobs with different options of presentation **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Wish there where more mobile options available. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** If you would like a easy to use product to provide data to your customers. This is it. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** No business problems I can think of. Increased availability of data to users is a huge benefit. ### 39. SAP Crystal Reports **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mauricio L. | Administrador de sistemas Microsoft, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2017 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is a real outstanding reporting software. I have used other reporting options but at the end I really prefer continuing working with this tool. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** If you want to use it as an expert you really need spend time learning how to use it. It really worth it **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Replacement of the reports service tool used to give them properly information to our clients and tool users. ### 40. Can' live without it **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carlos A J. | Mechanichal Engineer, Industrial Automation, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The idea of being able to create comprehensive reports from multiple sources that do not talk to each other is a big time saver **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I have been using it for so long I can't think of anything I don't like **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Make sure you learn how to use it as it is very complex and has many features **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being able to create compelling reports from different data points and silos ### 41. Cumbersome but Satisfying **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brigitte A. | System Support Specialist, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** After taking a class on the product i was eager to use the product and begin creating all sorts of reports. The capabilities of the product are endless. If you have a SQL background it could be cumbersome and frustrating, but once explained it is just another language to put under your belt. The reports you can generate are extremely customizable and a great way to reflect or compute raw data into a beautiful report. Also, the Help works very nicely as well. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is not straight-forward. Even with tech intuition i could not figure this program out. I had to take a class so that i could stop spending days on one report, and now i only spend minutes. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Take a quick class on how it works, and a book to explain the functions. A great solution to stream your data through in order to make it beautiful and dynamic. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ability to create a report template for a customer, and tell them to purchase the product to pull the information any time they like. With this product i no longer have to do ad-hoc querying and meet data demands. They are able to pull their own information with the report templates i have provided on an as-needed basis. Less work for me! ### 42. Crystal Reports makes my job so much easier! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kris S. | GIS Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** In my office, we integrate Crystal Reports with Cityworks ( a work and asset management program). There are tons of reports that can be derived from all the data and Crystal Reports allows me to get to that data quickly and easily. When someone in my office asks for data of some type from the work management program, they usually want it yesterday. It's very easy to format to make the report look professional. I also like that there is "backup" on the web for help. If you are having an issue that you can't figure out, you can usually type the question into google and find a response immediately. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Formulas could be made a little more user friendly. And the alignment buttons could be tweaked a little - they don't always seem to want to line things up exactly. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Shop and compare. For the price, try it. If you don't like it, you're not out of thousands of dollars. It's easy to do basic reports and impress others with the more difficult ones. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We keep up with labor, projected costs and materials used. We can keep up with categorized labor times such as regular labor, on-call labor and overtime. We have figured out how to move our laborers around to best maximize productivity. We can easily project the cost of an upcoming construction and we can look at what materials have been used in a certain time frame so that restocking can be done quickly and efficiently. ### 43. Hard time for testing on trial version (I had a very old version installed not compatible) **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carlos C. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 05, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I have a legacy code created with Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005. The idea is to compile everything on Visual Studio 2013 and see how much work I need to do in order to make it work (using Crystal Reports 2013). Just clicking on the file an "Run Custom Tool" and that's it. Completely backward compatibility. I am currently in the process of getting a license and start working with the new version available for .NET **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** All my disappointing was related to the installation time for the trial version. I had installed Visual Studio 2005 that includes Crystal Reports. It was a nightmare to upgrade. First issue, I just installed the new version of CR and a lot of errors. Then, trying to remove the old version of CR (64 bits) was even worst. I was not able to uninstalled it and took me many hours researching on what to do. After almost two days of work I was able to start testing the new version of CR. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** When doing a trial testing, be sure to have a clean environment with no other Crystal Reports versions installed. This will reduce the time of your testing. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I have legacy reports, very basic ones. I need to do an upgrade of the entire software for working in Visual Studio 2015. Crystal Reports is very easy to use and reduce the time on creating new reports. By upgrading to Crystal Reports 2013 I would like to continue having this benefits and since it is backward compatible I am reducing the time of my migration. ### 44. SAP Crystal Reports **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Douglas B. | Software Development Manager, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is particularly well suited for quickly writing simple reports, even if the user does not have a whole lot of technical knowledge or experience. It is somewhat less appropriate for more complex reports, although it does allow a wide range of formatting options for the report and the data contained therein. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The user interface can be a bit cluttered sometimes. The reports are saved in a binary file format and therefore unable to be "diffed" or looked at using source control tools. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Crystal Reports to create custom reports for several of our clients. Typically, we are in a scenario where the client is using some other software that does not provide reporting that is robust enough for their business needs. We also do some in house reporting with Crystal Reports, as it is the reporting engine that our CRM software uses. ### 45. Upgrade for use with Vista **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peggy T. | Controller/Treasurer, Utilities, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 13, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** The reports look so professional with Crystal. Our Project Managers are thrilled to be using this software with our new accounting software. We previously had one report that was custom written for us and now we use crystal for practically all reports. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** IT IS HARD TO WRITE REPORTS. I don't consider myself to be below average intelligence, but I've had a hard time trying to figure out how to even make changes to reports in crystal and now that I've upgraded, it's totally different so I'm going to have to start over. I took a 24 hour class in Crystal but I'm going to need a refresher class really soon. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** You will need more than a few hours of training to use this software. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Instead of having to purchase custom reports from our software folks, we've been able to manipulate their standard reports to provide all the information that we need on one report and for it to look like our guys are use to seeing. ### 46. It's been around long enough so Google searches can help me out of binds **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lori L. | Data Management Analyst, Hospital & Health Care, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Well, it's been around long enough so any challenges you encounter you can easily find the solution with a Google search. And for the same reason (ie. it's been around for a while) you can also find email-automation software that works with Crystal to automate reports. I am satisfied with all the emailing options. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Long, complex crosstab reports are nearly impossible! I have to think up crafty ways to enter the SQL so I can get the data to appear. For the sake of data integrity, the base of all reports should be the raw data that the report pulls from, and then do the counting, summing, etc. with that raw data. With Crystal it's nearly impossible to work with the raw, row-by-row data. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Crystal is very limited when it comes to fancy graphs. If you want that, check out software that uses D3. Otherwise Crystal is great bc it's been around for so darn long, you can get passed any challenge fairly easily. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** I create utilization data for my public healthcare agency. I work on a medical healthcare database with over 60K patients and hundreds of thousands of records. Crystal works with a software called "Visual Cut" and I use it a lot to automate reports in the early morning before providers and admin staff get to their offices. ### 47. SAP Crystal Reports - Make Your Reports Come Alive **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** What I like best about SAP Crystal Reports is the integration with other software and how easy it is to create reports that make sense out of all that data. We rely on SAP Crystal Reports to create reports that help us make important business decisions. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** There are a few things that I would like to see improved in SAP Crystal Reports, mainly that we had to deal with a few bugs, and that the program is not all that intuitive. Once you learn it it is easy to use, but we have had to spend (in my opinion) too much time training new employees on the software. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Put in the time to really learn the program because the better you know it, the more you will get out of it. It is able to do some great things but you have to know how to get it to do those things. If possible, make sure to include training in your purchase package. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAP Crystal Reports addresses our reporting needs, and the benefits we have seen from using this software is the ability to make better strategic decisions about our business based on real-time data. We have been able to identify where we were not as efficient as we could be, where we were wasting money, and make impactful decisions by using the reports we created with SAP Crystal Reports. ### 48. Great solution for custom reporting **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richard C. | Director of Revenue Management, Hospitality, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Ability to quickly create custom reports for any need. We are very limited on reporting from our system but this makes it super easy and fast! Crystal reports allows you to extract any data you wish from a database and present it in basically any matter. Once your report is setup, its as easy as clicking the refresh button to pull in the latest data which basically gives you a live feed to any data source. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Takes some technical knowledge to build reports but once you figure it out its pretty easy overall. Also, unless starting from a report that is already built, its a bit confusing to link the database you are working with. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our reservation system (hotel) has no custom reporting option and we were previously limited to the prebuilt reports which rarely provided the needed data ### 49. A Flexible and Powerful Tool Hampered by A Dreadful Interface **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Darian R. | Senior Designer Developer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I am a graphic designer, so I like that Crystal Reports works. You can do something to get some of the output to look a certain way. There are many tools to integrate your reports with different data sets, back end technologies and existing applications. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I dislike practically everything about the portion of the application that handles designing layouts for the reports. Crystal reports gives you tools that work well to process the information. That is absolutely true. However the tools I have used to design the output of the reports is terribly limiting and frustrating. There is a large gap between what you are doing on the back end and how it looks on the front end. Most of this may be simply that as a graphic designer I have high expectations, but for the most part I'm not trying to make a fancy design in Crystal Reports, but rather make a decent looking design. There are many steps involved and I feel like the whole thing is a house of cards waiting to topple over with the slightest nudge. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** I would recommend looking at other open source packages that are much more simplified. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We provide reports to our clients that generate invoices, punch sheets, order estimates and other information in a quick manner. ### 50. Easy upgrade **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ghislain P. | Analyst / Programmer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 22, 2016 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** I had Crystal Reports XI R2 installed on my computer. I installed Crystal Reports 2013 along with the SDK and all my applications were still working with the new dll versions. That is impressive. Even better. I deployed an existing application to our production server (which I did not upgrade the dlls) and my application is working like a charm. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** The only thing I disliked is the installation time. It took a long time to install on my computer. I don't know if it because it is virtualized and/or there were not enough ressources assigned to it but still it took about 45-60 minutes to install. The good thing is that it works well after that. **Recommendations to others considering SAP Crystal Reports:** Crystal Reports is a well known product, it integrates with different development environment and when you need help, there are plenty of ressources on the net about it. The features offered are more than enough (at least for our needs) and the price is very affordable. You can't go wrong with Crystal Reports. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed to automate our semestrial reports. By upgrading our Crystal Reports version, we are hoping to be able to make this task easier. We looked at other solutions but Crystal Reports seemed the logical choice since we were already familiar with it and 100% of our applications use Crystal Reports as a reporting solution. Since the upgrade went well, we don't have to rewrite/modify any of our applications to use the new version. That is a big plus. ## SAP Crystal Reports Discussions - [Why complex reports takes a bit more time to develop?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/why-complex-reports-takes-a-bit-more-time-to-develop) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What is SAP Crystal Reports?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-sap-crystal-reports) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [What is SAP Crystal used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-sap-crystal-used-for) - 1 comment - [View SAP Crystal Reports pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/sap-crystal-reports/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-12+05%3A24%3A14+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=31cc3728-cedd-4265-bf3c-7bbc2be347c3&secure%5Btoken%5D=374f45ce4d852983fc43d217d123630b3d2abafb25eb7bf62e4103a4acf886a7&format=llm_user) ## SAP Crystal Reports Integrations - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) ## SAP Crystal Reports Features **Reports** - Reports Interface - Steps to Answer - Graphs and Charts - Score Cards - Dashboards **Reports** - Reports Interface - Share Reports - Steps to Answer **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Visualization** - Graphs and Charts - Score Cards - Dashboards - Formats **Data Updates** - Historical Snapshots - Real-Time Updating **Collaboration** - Sharing - Co-Editing - Devices **Self Service ** - Calculated Fields - Data Column Filtering - Data Discovery - Search - Collaboration / Workflow **Advanced Analytics** - Data Visualization - Big Data Services **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs **Platform** - Mobile User Support - Customization - User, Role, and Access Management - Internationalization - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications **Data Updates** - Historical Snapshots - Real-Time Updating - Email Reports ## Top SAP Crystal Reports Alternatives - [Looker](https://www.g2.com/products/looker/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (1,585 reviews) - [Domo](https://www.g2.com/products/domo/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (1,013 reviews) - [Spotfire Analytics](https://www.g2.com/products/spotfire-analytics/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (328 reviews)