Crystal Enterprise vs Actuate 5

[akuchin]

NB: I have also posted this message on the thread for Actuate.

Hi everyone,
as you can see from the title, I'm also evaluating Crystal Enterprise vs Actuate (for web-reports). I would appreciate your opinion on the following situation.
The background: on the demo Actuate looked like a more powerful/cutting edge tool, but at the same time Crystal seems to be able to satisfy our needs. We use Crystal in client/server environment and may turn to getting it on the web through ASP.
Actuate claims to be similar to Access. Being our main report designer, I'm pretty proficient with Crystal, but I also know VB, COM and Access.
At this point, my main criteria are the following:
1) learning curve
2) speed of report design
2) availability of consultants
What do you, colleagues, think given the circumstances: is Actuate worth replacing Crystal?

 

[RoughingIT]

Not a chance in heck. They won't be around in a few years if they keep losing money like they are for the last few quarters. Try to get some decent support from them...

 

[SomeHelp]

I was part of a project at my company late last year where we evaluated web reporting tools Crystal against Actuate and here are some of my conclusions:

1. Learning curve: Actuate is not too bad if you have previous programming experience with VB and object oriented languages. Their Actuate Basic language is basically a copy of Microsoft's VB 3.0, a little out of date. You need to be familiar with object-oriented concepts so that you understand how to reuse report objects/components within the code of your reports. For someone that does not have much of a programming background, I would not recommend trying to use their Actuates e.Report Designer Professional product. They do have e.Report Designer product that is simpler to use than their Professional edition because it eliminates most of the complexities of working with their code repository. I would say that it would take 2 or 3 months for you to get comfortable/proficient with using their e.Report Designer Professional tool, even with a programming background. They even stated this in one of their presentations they did for my company. For someone with little or no programming background, I would say that 5 or 6 months would get them up to speed and productive with he product. If you do not have this type of time to learn a new reporting tool, then Crystal is the best way to go.

2. Training: The training I have attended was not very good because the class tended to jump around from feature to feature without giving you a good idea of how things are tied together. It seemed they were trying to hide the complexity of the tool by only having people update small features here and there with the reports. We had about 12 people in this 4 day Actuate class I attended and all 12 people had experience with Crystal previously, but most did not have a technical background like myself. These folks found the class to be "over their heads" and they were not very enthusiastic about the training materials either. Also, I know their training was more expensive than similar Crystal training.

3. Functionality: I would say that Crystal has much more built-in functionality than does Actuate. Crystal tends to have wizards that walk you through a particular process where as Actuate would take you part of the way there and you would then be required to insert code into the code generated by the wizard. Actuate allows you to extend its functionality with its basic language, which may enable you to perform operations that Crystal cannot. However, it has been my experience that this gap in functionality can be minimized by putting more of your business rules into database views so that Crystal does not have to handle all the manipulation of the data within the report itself. Drill-Down reports are a pain with Actuate and are very easy in Crystal, as you know. To simulate a Crystal drill-down report that allows you to drill-down from World to Country, from Country to State/Province and from State/Province to City, would require you to create 4 separate reports in Actuate. Obviously in Crystal this is simple to do in a single report. In Actuate you would have to create one report for Worldview, then insert a link in the report that would take you to the next report, which would be the Country report. Within Country report, insert links on all countries that would take you to the State/Province reports etc... You can see that if you had to convert all those drill-down Crystal reports into Actuate that you would have a maintenance nightmare. This is why Actuate recommends that you have a good naming convention at the beginning so that you can keep track of all your reports and their associations within their object repository. If you have not had to deal with maintaining naming standards before, this can be a huge task that is always going to cause problems.

4. Cross Platform: At the time we tested both products, Actuate could run totally on a Unix server and Crystal could not. This was a ding against Crystal, but we really didn't have a need to use Unix server because of cost. This availability of Actuate on the Unix platform is what causes a lot of bigger companies to take a closer look at it because they usually have a big investment into Unix hardware. However, when we ran Actuate on Windows NT 4.0 (SP6) platform, Crystal Enterprise out performed it in our testing. We used Mercury Interactives LoadRunner tool and found that Crystal Enterprise was about 25% much more efficient on processing and viewing reports on this platform. We were testing reports that ran real-time against a database, but Actuate does not really support this functionality because you must go through their scheduler in order to run real-time reports. I would say that if you are a Unix shop, that using Actuate might be a viable option. However, you can implement a hardware/software Crystal solution for much less that Actuate.

5. Licensing/Consulting: Actuate only has server based licensing and it is about 10K to 20K higher (per CPU) than Crystal Enterprises server based licensing. Actuate does not have a Concurrent Usage License or a Named User License as does Crystal. Crystal licensing give you much more overall flexibility than does Acutate's licensing. From a consulting perspective, I know that the Actuate developers we have used charge at least 2 to 3 times more per hour than do Crystal consultants. Actuate developers can cost as much as $225 per hour. Also, we had a hard time trying to find people with Actuate experience, so we ended up bringing in a few consultants temporarily in order to get us up to speed on learning Actuate via OJT. We have people with good programming backgrounds so we did not struggle too badly with picking up their tool.

Overall, I would say that Crystal could usually satisfy about 80%-90% of all your reporting needs. However, if you have some very complex reporting that needs to be done, then you might want to consider a tool like Actuate that does provide extra flexibility, but you need to have seasoned programmers on staff that know what they are doing. In summary, I would suggest using Crystal because of all the advantages I mentioned above as well as their future direction of being able to run totally on a Unix platform and having a Java JDK available within the next few months. Also, if you a big Microsoft .NET shop, Crystal has version of Crystal Reports for .NET that allows you to create reports that act as web services.

I hope this helps...

 

[akuchin]

Wow, this is probably the best help I could get! Thanks a lot!

 

[SteveRemington]

One small point to add to SomeHelp's comprehensive reply. Crystal Enterprise 8.5 will now run completely on Unix platforms as well as Windows NT/2000. I think from memory that it will initially be available for Sun Solaris with other commonly used flavours of Unix to follow.

 

[HowardHammerman]

Excellent comments from SomeHelp.

However, you should know that the MINIMUM expenditure for Crystal Enterprie will be $50,000. Have you looked into simply creating your reports in Active Sever Pages?

Are all those other features worth the money?

Howard Hammerman,

Crystal Reports training, consulting, books, training material, software, and support. Scheduled training in 8 cities.
howard@hammerman.com

http://www.hammerman.com

800-783-2269