What are the best reporting tools for medium sized operation (open and commercial)

Question

If a business needed to connect to a various database and generate PDF mostly reports, what are some good tools. Commercial or Opensource. Non technical users should also be able to generate various reports with good looking charts and tabular data through a report designer tool. As well, we should be able to deploy these charts on the web and generate HTML or PDF.

We looked at various tools like Adobe LiveCycle and haven't looked at Crystal Reports.

I am more the technical person and not really the business guy and I would mind something more techie like Eclipse's BIRT (business reporting tool). Everything looks good with Birt and does exactly what we might need but the charts don't look that impressive.

And with Crystal Reports, once you bring in those vendors, they sell a bunch of stuff that you normally don't need and it is impossible to get stuff done. But I could be wrong.

Answer 1

Commercial and for large applications:

BI Publisher

Answer 2

Telerik reporting looks great. Main advantage is that you can create your reports , and store them in dll assemblies that can be used on the web and on the desktop viewer. In the same time, with all exports needed.

Disadvantage is that report designer is still in Visual Studio. DotNet only.

Answer 3

I used abcPDF by webSuperGoo product. It was fine and simple for quick develoment.

I used this about 5 years ago so it should be a bit more up to date by now.

Answer 4

Livecycle Forms is a good choice. The whole thing is about constructing PDF documents starting with a template which you design and injecting data into the template in the form of XML. The final result is a flat or interactive PDF. Livecycle Forms was designer to produce interactive PDFs but it is pretty simple to flatten the documents when rendering is completed.

You may have to write a decent amount of custom code to construct the XML documents, but the PDF construction capabilities are pretty impressive. If you have a complicated workflow, the Livecycle package also has a workflow designer that you can use.

Answer 5

Then you need FastReport.Net, here is the technical part, its a .Net reporting tool,uses several .Net languages, source code available,It is compatible with .NET Framework 2.0 and higher.Check it and see if it goes for your needs.