--- 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: '2026-07-13' 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 love the **endless reporting capabilities** of SAP Crystal Reports, benefiting from numerous options and integrations. (1 reviews) - Users find SAP Crystal Reports **easy to use for basic reporting** , although complexity increases with advanced features. (1 reviews) - Users value the **easy integrations** of SAP Crystal Reports across various databases, enhancing their reporting capabilities. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **extensive integrations** of SAP Crystal Reports, providing endless reporting capabilities and options. (1 reviews) - Users find the **intuitive reporting capabilities** of SAP Crystal Reports helpful for multiple databases yet complex for advanced tasks. (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, especially concerning version requirements and integration challenges. (1 reviews) - Users find the learning process for SAP Crystal Reports **slightly difficult** , requiring additional training to master the software. (1 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** of SAP Crystal Reports requires additional training to master effectively. (1 reviews) - Users find the **limited customization** in SAP Crystal Reports restricts their ability to modify and enhance reports effectively. (1 reviews) - Users are frustrated by the **limited customization options** in SAP Crystal Reports, hindering their ability to modify 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. Design Docs and Database Links for Effortless Bulk Report & Admit Card Generation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lovepreet S. | Graphic Designer and Software Tester, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 09, 2026 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** BEST THING IS WE CAN DESIGN THE DOC AND CONNECT IT WITH LIVE DATABASE, I USE IT FOR REPORT CARDS AND CONSOLIDATES, FROM DESIGNING THE REPORT CARD AND THE ADDING DATABASE CONNECTIONS TO FETCH THE REQUIRED FIELDS IN THE FILE, THIS HELPS A LOT. I ALSO USE IT TO GENERATE BULK ADMIT CARD, SIMPLY CREATE ONE DESIGN, LINK DATABASE, AUTOMATICALLY IT GETS THE DATA AND ONE BEST THING IS ABOUT THE FILTERS, WE HAVE N NUMBER OF FILTERS LIKE CL,SEC,ADNO ETC (ACC TO DB FIELDS), ON THE OTHER HAND MAKING FORMULAS IN BASIC SYNTAX AND CRYSTAL SYNTAK IS VERY EASY, I WRITE FORMULE IN VISUAL BASICS, NO ALTERNATIVE FOR THIS SOFTWARE, ITS LIKE SINGLE SOFTWARE TO GET MULTIPLE NEEDS DONE. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I USE CRYSTAL REPORTS XI RELEASE 2, I FEEL AUTO SAVE OPTION SHOULD BE THERE, IT MIGHT BE THERE IN NEWER VERSION, I M NOT SURE BUT ITS VERY MUCH REQUIRED. MANY TIMES SOFTWARE MAY HANG DUE TO MULTIPLE REASONS LIKE SYSTEM CONFIGUARATION, DATA SHOULD BE SAVED , AUTO SAVE SHOULD BE THERE **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SINCE I MAKE REPORT CARDS,CONSOLIDATES & ADMIT CARDS IN THIS SOFTWARE, IT HELPS A LOT TO SAVE TIME, CREATE ONE TIME DESIGN,LINK DB AND THEN PRINT IN BULK. EVEN IF WE WANT TO ADD ANOTHER DATABASE JUST COPY AND ADD NEW, SUPER EASY AND SAVES TIME. NOT ONLY TIME , THE WORK PREVIOUSLY WHICH WAS REQUIRED 2-3 PEOPLES TO COMPLETE BY MAKING MANUAL RC'S, THIS SOFTWARE MADE IT EASY FOR 1 PERSON ONLY TO USE,THIS HELPS IN SAVING MONEY TOO. AND FILTERING IS SOO SOO MUCH EASY AND GOOD, YOU CAN FILTER DATA ON ANY OF THE DB FIELD AVAILABLE, THIS HELPS A LOT TO SAVE TIME, FOR FILTERS(SELECT EXPERT) I GIVE 10/10. VERY HELPFULL, TIME SAVING AND COST SAVING ### 2. Powerful Reporting & Integrations, But Needs More Training to Master **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wholesale | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 15, 2026 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Endless capabilities to reporting with so many options and integrations. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Slightly difficult to learn, more training needed. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reporting functions ### 3. SAP Crystal Reports still makes sense? **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yassiem D. | IT consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2024 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It's a powerful report tool with a sometimes counterintuitive design process, follows a ribbon region approach It can report across a multitude of databases like MS SQL, MySQL, sqlite, Oracle via JDBC, ODBC, ADO etc. basic reporting is easy but it quickly gets hard once you try more complex reports was once widely used as an embedded reporting tool with canned reports. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** deployment is hard, you can quickly fall foul of the compatible version requirements it's mostly Windows based, very poor support for Linux the licensing is tolerable for small deployments but quickly becomes unaffordable showing the SAP influence support/training costs are ridiculous. thus many users are under-trained to make the best use of crystal reports integration becomes a headache when you upgrade databases doesn't easily connect to Oracle DB's **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** basic financial and production reporting is fine with canned reports. ### 4. SAP Crystal make an easy edit into Forms **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian C. | Information Technology Support Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 13, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** You can manage or edit the form to what the value will appear upon printing **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Nothing at all; I'm enjoying using it ,it very usefull **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** It can make my forms editable and customizable ### 5. SAP Crystal Reports Viewer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2024 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** What I like best is its ability to offer a clear and interactive view of reports without needing the full application. it's gui is friendly and provides good visualizations. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I dislike the limited interactivity compared to the full software. It's nice foe viewing and perform basic analysis, but it lacks customization and editing features to modify reports. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps a lot because it allows easy access to detailed reports without requiring the full software. In this direction, its a light solution to view and analyze complex data quickly and accurately for team members who only need to consume, rather than create reports. ### 6. Ease of assigning tasks through SAP **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pragya J. | Senior Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 15, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** We use SAP to assign contract review requests received from our business stakeholoders and SAP provides that ease of assining and tracking requests. Through SAP, we can easily access the stage of assigned request and do follow ups with business stakeholders. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** When any reqeust is assigned, we get access link on the email. However, you cannot directly click on the link to access the request as you have to initially login before clicking on the link. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAP is helping ourorganization in tracking the assigned tasks, the stage where the assigned tasks is and it also helps us in following up with business stakeholders. ### 7. For those that put in the work to learn this tool, not much out there can compare **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Melissa O. | HRIS Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Very flexible way to creat a presentation layer to your data and rinse and repeat as often as you like. In dealing with very complex HR data as well as data from other sources, you can create and store formulas, sorting, grouping, alternate column titles and then simply get new data and get the same formatting applied. I have used the tool extensively to combine data for technical analysis as well as parsed data for creating individual PDFs for data presentation with user specific data included. Works well for simple data presentation to the very complex way you can manipulate with grouping, SQL queries, etc. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** There is a learning curve both to knowing how to use this tool to it's fullest capabilities but I could say that about many of the common tools such as SQL query and even Excel. Fortunately there are many resources to learn this including Linked In Learning or in person courses. Some of the most useful tools such as creating groups and moving your groups into the group's footers work really well but to go back and know that was what was done later is not very transparent. The tool can get behind on some formats it supports - for example once the XLSX format was the preferred format, Crystal took some time before this was available as an export but that was also years ago and they may be better at this currently. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** Two uses that I use it commonly for are easily combining different data sources with visual joins and then being able to group, create formulas, create page breaks, and easily fresh with new data. Creating individual conference itineraries using several data sources. Summarizing data for each person and creating groups with page breaks that allowed me to output a single PDF. Then that PDF could be broken up to individual PDF files that could be distributed to users. ### 8. A very good tool to generate reports **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maria R. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** This was one of the aps that I used the most of all SAP tools, the interface was very easy to use, you have many options for editing and creating reports, has the ability to join different databases and is very useful because I do not have to use different applications. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** Like most SAP applications, you must have a previous training and support to be able to use the application in the best way since there are different tools that at first sight can be a little difficult to use but after having confidence with the app, it is very useful and fast to use. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** The solution that this software offered me was to have the possibility to create, edit and share different reports and data analysis, I could use different sources of information and organize it in a single application with the advantage that reports could be unified in the same area. ### 9. Great Tool For Creating Dynamic Business Reports **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sunaina Y. | Digital Marketer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 16, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** It is a very helpful and easy-to-use tool to design or create our business reports. It is also helping us to analyze our data so that we can make good stratergy to make the report more good next time. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** I'm Using it for my projects. According to me for now, there is nothing to dislike about SAP Crystal. In starting I faced some issues but now I am used to it easily. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAP Crystal mostly helps to create very good business reports with good deisgns. You can create different types of reports in it like Sales Reports, Financial Reports, Preprinted Reports, HR Reports, and Promotional Reports. It is making my work easier. ### 10. Fantastic BI Tool for Customizations **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ruthvik J. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2023 **What do you like best about SAP Crystal Reports?** Our business uses SAP Crystal mainly as a embedded product. The programming language and the customizations are very intuitive. We have used this tool for handlng large data, creating customs reports, sub-totals, and categorize that data into tables and graphs. We found that the data source connectivity was very crucial and it worked really well. **What do you dislike about SAP Crystal Reports?** It does take quiet the effort to learn this tool. We ended up facing lot of problems during deployment. The configuration was not easy to setup. **What problems is SAP Crystal Reports solving and how is that benefiting you?** We used Crystal Reports to help us embed more robust products for our customers and give them accurate data and statistics. ## 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/sap-crystal-reports-review-94376?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-14+19%3A39%3A18+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=180fc154-7e60-417b-9962-320039ebc937&secure%5Btoken%5D=969c8111d85aec21f1cf9fa18468b0c1b60247cc2aa97648fb91e2bd68acd6bf&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 (1,587 reviews) - [Domo](https://www.g2.com/products/domo/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (1,015 reviews) - [Spotfire Analytics](https://www.g2.com/products/spotfire-analytics/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (328 reviews)