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."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."
"The initial setup of the solution is pretty easy."
"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."
"We use SAP Crystal Reports for operational reporting."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a fantastic way of generating reports."
"It is an user-friendly solution."
"I find Crystal Reports very easy to use, even for a non-technical person."
"It's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly... they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training."
"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."
"It has the ability to easily integrate into existing apps with little code. If you know how to use MS Office, you can create a report."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."
"The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers."
"If at all possible, a little bit of improvement on the analytical side is needed."
"A real improvement would be a simpler system that allows users to play with the visualization without needing specialized skills and code."
"SAP Crystal Reports has some compatibility issues with third-party products."
"There could be improvements made to the analytics capabilities."
"The financing part needs improvement."
"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."
"SAP Crystal Reports should provide better support for dynamic connectors."
"It would be nice to have a black-and-white, ideal setup for servers, to maximize capabilities. We went through a lot of scenarios to get something that is scalable. An ideal AWS-package server setup could have saved us a lot of time. But I understand this is very company specific."
"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."
"The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem."
"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."
"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."
"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."
"The tool does not support macOS documents."
"About six months ago, we raised the possibility of improving the way they manage the HTML 5. Sometimes, when you insert a lot of data in the data source, you get an error because it is not managing HTML 5 features well. I believe they have addressed this in later versions of their product."
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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, CA Easytrieve Report Generator, Templafy and OpenText Magellan BI & Reporting.
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