You won’t find many business intelligence companies knowledgeable enough -and willing to- talk about competitor’s products. In fact, when we compare Yurbi to other business intelligence (BI) solution, people are often surprised. But at 5000fish, we think letting you know how Yurbi stacks up against other BI solutions like SAP Crystal Reports is the right way to do business. In fact, cutting through marketing hype and giving you straight talk about the pros and cons of Crystal Reports, Yurbi, and other BI solutions is part of our commitment to Customer Success.
If you’d like to learn more about how Yurbi and Crystal Reports (CR) compare and contrast, you’ve come to the right place.
SAP Crystal Reports $495 price tag is alluring to small businesses working with limited budgets, but that doesn’t reflect its true cost of ownership. For starters, once you license the server, you need to get user licenses for the server. Plus, you need mobile user licenses for the server, and you must license a designer tool to build reports and license a designer tool to build dashboards. In addition to the expense of purchasing licenses, you’ll also have to pay a developer who is skilled in CR proprietary language to utilize it in any way. From pulling data to building reports and dashboards, leveraging Crystal Reports requires the skill of a developer.
Yurbi’s pricing model is simple, predictable and transparent. User licenses start at just $250 per month for 5 users and that price includes all the powerful features of the Yurbi platform. Yurbi also offers a flexible pricing model that lets you purchase only what you need right now, and scale as your business develops. In addition to lower licensing costs, the costs associated with Yurbi’s implementation, deployment, training and maintenance are also less than Crystal Reports. Also, because Yurbi was designed for the business user, you won’t need to pay a developer to run reports, etc.- the users can do it themselves.
With Crystal Reports, security is built into the report itself. That means when you need a report for two different audiences, the developer must establish security settings for each report. In addition to being time-consuming and costly, this approach to data security is also risky. Quite different from CR, Yurbi’s “App Shield” feature provides centralized data level security. A security profile is created and applied to a specific user or a user group. Every time the person or group interacts with Yurbi, such as running a report or viewing a dashboard, their security profile is automatically applied.
Yurbi includes an assortment of powerful self-service features, such as dashboards, ad-hoc reporting, and scheduling. With Crystal Reports, business user can’t pull data, build dashboards applications or engage in an ad-hoc query building on their own; a CR developer is required to tackle these tasks.
Crystal Reports has been around for years and enjoys widespread use, but a quick Google search reveals many of its users are disappointed with its customer support. On the other hand, because it is such popular software, there is a massive online community that CR users can turn to when they’re faced with a challenge. Being a smaller, client driven organization, 5000fish Customer Success team is committed to not only ensuring clients understand Yurbi software, but also that they know how to use Yurbi to meet the business objectives that drove them to a BI solution in the first place.
Crystal Reports is known for giving developers the power to create highly customized, pixel-perfect reports in almost any layout, and in up to two dozen languages. Yurbi was created with the business user in mind, so its report formatting and layout options are not as robust as those offered by Crystal Reports. However, Yurbi does give the business user the power to perform traditional production type reporting- and that satisfies the needs of many users and organizations.
It’s important to note that although Yurbi and Crystal Reports are both excellent solutions that offer a number of benefits, they are fundamentally different. Yurbi is an agile BI solution and Crystal Reports is a traditional BI solution. If you’d like to become familiar with the differences between agile BI and traditional BI, you’ll find this blog post helpful.
If you’re looking create highly customized, pixel-perfect reports and you have a budget that can handle its total cost of ownership, Crystal Reports could be a solution that meets your needs. On the other hand, if you want a cost effective solution that offers best in class security and doesn’t require the skills of a developer, Yurbi might be a good fit.
When comparing BI software and software vendors, you’ll also want to think about how you want to be treated as a customer and consider your customer support needs. As with any of the Big Boys of BI, you’re going to be a small fish in a big pond with SAP. If you work with a smaller BI vendor like 5000fish, you’ll be treated like a big fish in a little pond.
We hope this review of Yurbi versus Crystal Reports was informative. Now, find out how other popular BI solutions compare by exploring more straight talk reviews.
Have you worked with Yurbi or Crystal Reports? If so, we’d like to hear your thoughts about our assessment. Leave your comments and generate a discussion.
