Crystal Reports vs ReportViewer Pros/Cons?

crystal-reports reporting
ben picture ben · Sep 29, 2008 · Viewed 22.2k times · Source

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

mattlant picture mattlant · Sep 29, 2008

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.

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