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Crystal Reports or WebIntelligence

by: Kristen St. Jean, Senior Consultant, CRCP

There is no cut and dry answer to this question, however, there are advantages and disadvantages to each tool that we will discuss here.

Crystal Reports is the transactional reporting tool in the Business Objects suite of products.  It is designed to handle a large amount of data efficiently and can format that data in almost any way that you desire. 

Let’s take a look at a few of the advantages of using Crystal Reports:

• Crystal Reports can be very highly formatted
• Crystal Reports has a very robust formula language which allows for complex formulas to be created within reports
• Crystal Reports can connect to almost any kind of database that you can find, from SQL Server databases to individual Excel spreadsheets
• Multiple data sources may be used in one report
• Reports can be saved and scheduled in Business Objects Enterprise
• Reports can be exported to many different formats (Word, Excel, CSV, etc.)

Let’s look at a few of the disadvantages:

• Report designers must have a good knowledge of the database and relationships within the database
• Crystal Reports Designer is a stand-alone application
• Reports can be time-consuming to create depending on the complexity

Web Intelligence is Business Objects’ ad-hoc query tool.  It is designed to be user friendly so end users can quickly create documents that answer important business questions.

What are the advantages of Web Intelligence?

• Web Intelligence is a web-based tool, so no client side installations are necessary
• The objects in the Universe that the Web Intelligence Document is built from have user-friendly names that relate to the end user’s business
• Reports are created by simply dragging and dropping objects onto the report to form tables where the data is displayed.  These tables can be easily changed into charts or other types of tables available in the templates menu
• End users can create their own reports inside of Business Objects Enterprise
• Reports can be scheduled within Business Objects Enterprise
• Summarizes data in the SQL that it produces making the query as efficient as possible

Web Intelligence has a few disadvantages also:

• Can only be exported to PDF, CSV, or Excel formats
• Is only available to users with access to Business Objects Enterprise
• Requires a Business Objects Universe as its data source (this is true for Business Objects XIR2 but may change in future releases).  Creation of Business Objects Universes can be very complex based on the reporting needs of the end users

In summary, there are many business scenarios where either tool can be used.  A decision has to be made as to whether you use both tools in your Business Objects Enterprise environment or you choose to only use one of the two.  Generally, my recommendation is to use Crystal Reports for reports where the selection criteria and required data doesn’t change often (ie. monthly financial reports, daily sales reports, etc.), large amounts of data are being returned, or multiple data sources are required.  I would use Web Intelligence for reports that are mainly summarized data, not much formatting is necessary, the requirements change on a regular basis, or end users need the ability to change the filters and the formatting of the report. 

In the end, there’s no definitive right or wrong answer since both of the tools can create very similar reports, but these are some guidelines to consider when choosing when to use Crystal Reports and when to use Web Intelligence.   

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