We performed a comparison between SAP Crystal Reports and Windward Core based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in Reporting."We use SAP Crystal Reports for operational reporting."
"SAP Crystal Reports offers a plethora of features, many of which were available much earlier than in the Crystal Reports we previously used. We extensively use its capabilities for generating general reports, working with Kaspersky data, and even incorporating images into our reports. The range of functions available in SAP Crystal Reports is diverse, and we leverage them across various systems for our needs."
"The initial setup of the solution is pretty easy."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a fantastic way of generating reports."
"I find Crystal Reports very easy to use, even for a non-technical person."
"The most valuable feature is that from a user's point of view, it is easy to use and requires just a simple click to generate a report."
"It is an user-friendly solution."
"One of the things they added in the last two or three years is PODs, Portable Object Doclets. One of our clients said they wanted to use PODs. They're a good way to make some constructs modular and keep things in one place."
"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."
"From an integration perspective, they provide the code for you to easily integrate with existing applications."
"The most valuable features are the ability for it to be integrated into our software solution and the AutoTag tool that allows us to quite quickly create and update the templates themselves."
"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."
"You can use Microsoft Office as your designer interface. There is very little programming. You can have nontechnical people create reports."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that it uses Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel as base templates, so when you generate, it's easy for clients to upgrade, and maintain, and generate out either a PDF or an actual Excel spreadsheet."
"The ability for users to have design and layout control is also critically important. Without this ability, procuring report designs would represent a huge bottleneck. Report design tools also enable upsell opportunities for customized reports, with quick turnaround times."
"A real improvement would be a simpler system that allows users to play with the visualization without needing specialized skills and code."
"If at all possible, a little bit of improvement on the analytical side is needed."
"SAP Crystal Reports has some compatibility issues with third-party products."
"There could be improvements made to the analytics capabilities."
"SAP Crystal Reports should provide better support for dynamic connectors."
"It has significantly enhanced security features, especially when compared to the standard security features of the earlier PeerSpot version I purchased. I've observed improvements in security, and overall, it's quite commendable. Regarding potential enhancements for the next release of this solution, I haven't closely examined SAP Crystal Reports 53. I've only encountered it briefly, perhaps once or twice. However, I anticipate that it likely offers advanced features distinct from its predecessor. I believe there may be notable improvements and additions in the latest version, and I look forward to exploring them further."
"The financing part needs improvement."
"They could make the document creation performance faster. I'm not saying it's slow but it takes time to create the PDFs. If they could make it faster, that would be one area for improvement."
"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."
"One thing that frustrated us a little bit is that we have to use the Office PDF generation, because the native PDF generation is always slightly different compared to the one in Office. The formatting is just a little bit off here and there... This means that we need to have Office installed on the server to be able to generate these documents via API."
"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."
"Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same."
"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"The reason it took us so long to get the system up and running is that the APIs could be improved a bit. It could be a little bit more interoperable with software, without having to do a lot of the heavy lifting that we had do to get it in."
Earn 20 points
SAP Crystal Reports is ranked 9th in Reporting with 48 reviews while Windward Core is ranked 24th in Reporting. SAP Crystal Reports is rated 8.4, while Windward Core is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of SAP Crystal Reports writes "Helps analyze your data by creating richly formatted, pixel-perfect, and multiple reports from virtually any data source, delivered in over a dozen formats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Windward Core writes "It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes". SAP Crystal Reports is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, TIBCO Jaspersoft, Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, IBM Cognos and Alteryx, whereas Windward Core is most compared with Docmosis, Nintex Document Generation and OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting.
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