Crystal vs Actuate 4

[akuchin]

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?

 

[itsuker]

Did you found anything?
I have the same problem now.
Can you advise me?

 

[balachandar]

Hi,
Having worked with both the products these are the points that I have observed.
1. Crystal Reports are superior when it comes to connecting to databases. It supports all databases that are available in the market.Actuate does not support stored procedures of even popular databases like SQL Server, IBM DB2.
2.Crystal Reports website provide excellent support to the registered uses And their website provides solutions to every problem that You would face generally with crystal reports. i.e Learning curve varies from person to person .But Crystal provides more help to the user.
3. Ease of development : Again crystal over takes actuate.
Formula fields,condtional formatting , So many wizards(including Cross tab and OLAP). Actuate gives tabular(does any one use it?,),columnar and few more.
4.Actuate over takes crystal reports in reuse of objects:
Probably this is only advantage that actuate can provide. But This does not compensate for the other disadvantages.

5. Integrating with other applications:
Crystal reports can be integrated with VB,Vc++,ASP applciations easily and effortlessly.
Above all Crystal reports come with .Net. The world generally goes where ever Microsoft goes.

Regards
Balachandar Ganesan.

 

[gazolba]

Crystal is much more expensive to deploy. Investigate the cost of Crystal Enterprise seats!
Actuate supports stored procedures in Oracle, I don't know abou the others but I'd be very surprised if it does not support SQL server stored procedures via ODBC.
Actuate is much more difficult to learn and its user interface is much less intuitive than Crystal. I learned Crystal in 2 weeks, I'm still struggling with Actuate after 3 months.

 

[WAndrewW]

I have used Actuate with Stored procedures on DB2 - AS400.
Generally my knowledge is more advanced with Actuate. Actuate seems to offer more control to the programmer than does crystal especially in the area of customizing SQL.

 

[admiralman]

I have used Actuate for a year and a half and have been trying like hell to get it replaced. The system overall has tremendous capabilities and is very powerful when compared to Crystal. However, the main problem with Actuate is their reliability. We started out with v4.0 and developed several reports. Then Actuate came out with v5.0 which was not backward compatible in several areas requiring me to rewrite the reports. Then there were service packs because the application was extremely buggy and ultimately there are still no fixes. They have released a final service pack that has negated funtionality of all of our reports and they must be rewritten as well. The documentation of the product is horrible and their examples are childlike and very often are not applicable to real world situations. They have a pretty good forums section on their website that is very helpful but the majority of the information should be maintained in their documentation. Actuate is written based upon a bastardized version of VB 4 and they are trying to call it object oriented. Overall, I think Actuate is the most frustrating technology I have every worked with and my skillset includes, C, C++, JAVA, all the web technologies, SQL Server DBA etc...

I hate the product.

 

[johngw]

I have been developing in Actuate for 4 years and have the following issues.

1. The product is buggy
2. The documentation is as rather light
3. Actuate support is appalling, they are unresponsive unless you a re a very large company.
4. The product lacks fundamental functionality that a reporting tool should have such as printer control.

This is a quote from the Actuate support team

“Unfortunately we, the technical support are not too well-versed in report designing & development.”

That about sums them up.

 

[sunilkumarmail]

I have been using the product for over 4 years now, and have been working with almost all of their versions. Most of my clients are fairly satisfied by its performance.

The comments above I am sure are out of frustration. Actuate is a very powerful and versatile product BUT it is fairly complex. I guess people entrusted with development tasks in Actuate should be put through a good training programme. Initially it may be a good idea for the clients to take assistance from Actuate Corporation themselves/ their SI partners for architecture and pilot development.

Let us discuss this further and may be I can help you guys reduce your frustration.

Regards
Sunil

 

[lwlee]

I have a fair amount of experience with Actuate eReport Server on Solaris. From what I know of Seagate Info (I think now Crystal Enterprise), it doesn't come close to Actuate. Actuate 6 has clustering capability and is capable of a fairly high volume of reports per hour. Though it's a bit of a memory hog at least for v4.

 

[icytrue]

Crystal Enterprise is a big leap forward from Seagate Info, so it would be wrong to judge on the old product, Crystal Enterprise is well established in terms of scalability and management and has much, much better web integration than Seagate Info - it is a solely web based product, that is a new begininng rather than a evolution from Seagate Info. Icytrue

icytrue@hotmail.com