I use Stimulsoft Reports with Visual C# 2005 and VistaDB. Originally I used Crystal Reports, but had Big Problems with the Access. So I've tested Stimulsoft Reports and was 100% satisfied. It's Easy to use. The functionality is exactly what I need and until now I do not reach any boundaries. It's extremely good embedded into the Visual C# Environment. A Big plus is the possibility to save the Report As C# source Code and include the Files directly into source-Code. It was Easy to create the Reports with the Report wizard and it's also Easy to change the Reports later. I've tested a Lot of other products (like ActiveReport) but I never repented the decision for Stimulsoft Reports.

It's a great product which I really like to recommend.

Uwe Porsch

You people are just great and the service is a 5 star. I have downloaded it on my machine and will be using your software for my software development. When I go live, I will purchase the software.

Thank you a million.

I am very pleased and happy that at last I have found very good .NET software.

Ratan Kalwa
Director and CTO
Leasing Brain Limited
UK

Finding optimal reporting system in C# I run against Stimulsoft Reports. Traditional principle of template building, used by many report designers, allowed starting our work immediately. But the most attractive thing was ability to increase functionality directly in C#. And this means that all power of .NET Framework, including invaluable MSDN base of knowledge. Young project that uses all power of API from Microsoft surpassed lots of their elderly competitors.

Perfect start!

Andrei
Programmer

We recently purchased your Stimulsoft Reports product and have been developing an application around it. I have been extremely impressed with the software's capabilities and ease of use. We have sent quite a few emails with questions regarding how to use the product. In all cases, your response has been prompt, courteous, and correct. Some of our questions were even answered with code changes on your end and new DLLs.

I just wanted to thank you for all your support and timely responses.
Thanks and keep up the great work!!

Dan Snyder
Manager Application Development - Information Services
IWCO Direct

I spent a couple of weeks looking for an end-user reporting tool that we could integrate into our software. Most of the .NET report writers I looked at wanted the user to edit their report in Visual Studio (or something similar) which can be intimidating for non-developers. I needed an easy-to-use reporting tool for my users. Stimulsoft has such an extensive API that you can set it up to work for novice users, advanced users or anywhere in-between. I was able to provide a very nice integration into my product. And, the technical support is superb. I have never seen a company that is so responsive to questions and quick to fix issues that arise. I am very impressed with Stimulsoft. I highly recommend this product.

Sandy Pham
Cherwell Software, Inc.
USA

I've now been using Stimulsoft Reports (seriously) for one week now, and I must say I extremely impressed, and surprised by the robustness and flexibility of this product. I have used several reporting products in my many years as a programmer, but none as easy to use as this one. Congratulations to all those who have made it possible! Whenever I have found a problem or asked a question, both the online community and support have resolved the issue in a prompt and efficient manner.

Just my 2 cents worth...

Martin
Spain

I've been using Stimulsoft Reports for almost 7 months in our company. And I don't think I will need another reporting tools because we already dump our non Stimulsoft Reports reporting tools to my recycle bin and never thinking of restore it back. So, thank you guys, you've done a great job...

Keep it up!!!

Achmad Mulyadi
Indonesia

Our company develops a Point-of-Sale application. It is developed in Clarion for Windows. Clarion has its own database format and reporting engine for compiling built in reports and provides some programmatic options for inserting code during ANY of the report rendering process. This however only allows our developers to make layouts/design/logic for these reports. There is also a product called Clarion Report Writer which is an AFTER MARKET report design tool primarily for TPS database files (Clarion's database format). This allows us to have our customer design their own reports but without any logic besides filtering, sorting and basic prompting. It was also an extra fee ($300/per license) to our customers and a separate product which provided almost no integration into our application besides the ability to call a report designed in Report writer from our software.

A 3rd party developer made a simple report designer for clarion that would allow us to pump information into the designer as we'd like users to see it (pre-formatted data and fields) and would allow us to provide a basic designer for some of our more "static" reports. It was FULL of bugs and would allow us to add/remove/move fields, but there was almost no logic/sorting/filtering. This was all provided by our program's logic which could not be changed by the end-user. On top of that this solution was ONLY for TPS databases. We soon realized that the TPS database limited us in regards to the tools we could use. There was an ODBC driver for TPS but this is licensed per computer and is an extra $199. The ODBC would open us up to tools like MS-ACCESS, Crystal Reports, and other solutions but it was finicky and could be extremely slow. We finally made the switch to SQL Server with our software. Which meant that we could no provide our Crappy little built-in report designer which was built only for TPS files. Although Clarion's Compiler could be used this provided no designer to our end-users. Clarion Report Writer worked but was still very unfriendly and lacking features.

One of our software dealers suggested we take a serious look at Crystal Reports. We purchased the developer's kit and found it easy enough to use for basic reports and easy enough to call for printing but there was no run-time designer. They in fact used to provide one but it was long gone and although you could sometimes find someone willing to let you dig into their old dev kit and use the designer, this wasn't exactly in keeping with the license agreement. As a report designer, Crystal would let us design against one database. Provide decent filtering, sorting and logic and then allow us to save the report, drop it into ANY environment with the same database schema, provide connection information and easily run the report. This could also all be done using their Developer API. We quickly provided support for adding and printing crystal report in our application. However, we were STILL lacking a run-time designer.

Our requirements were simple and it seemed like (besides the designer) crystal reports had our needs pegged. We needed a report engine that would deploy as an API in our software, it would provide a facility to for us to dynamically add reports to our software, provide connection information, preview reports, and print them. We also needed a way to have our program give a set of data to the reporting engine (for those cases where our program would need to do EXTENSIVE prep-work and logic on the data. If all of this were provided, we would be willing to fore-go the run-time designer and either resell a designer at an added cost or have our user go buy a designer (like Crystal Reports), granted it could open existing reports from our application and allow our end-users to "customize" them. A super plus for us was the ability to customize how and where these reports were saved. We were now using a central SQL Server and it would be best if the reports could be stored INSIDE the SQL Database. This meant that if a USER at Workstation 1 made or customized a report that users at all the other Workstations would be able to see these report changes. Also this all had to be done and licensed as a royalty-free API that we would purchase once (or at least maintain a subscription to) and be allowed to distribute for free. We have demo and free versions of our software and if we had to pay a royalty it would KILL us.

Crystal was almost there but not quite. Small and compact API which was straight forward. Licensing was great. However there was no way to pump custom data to it. It didn't have the run-time designer. We couldn't customize where it stored reports. Plus as far as support and features go, Crystal has a TERRIBLE reputation in the reporting community. With all of this WE WERE SO SUPER CLOSE to rewriting major portions of our program to support only crystal reports. We could find a way around the features it was lacking but some MAJOR work would have to be done. Our invoice layout is actually 4 reports in one. Using logic in our program we pump the correct data into the layout depending on whether it is an INVOICE, ORDER, SERVICE ORDER or LAYAWAY. The layouts are all the same (with minor hiding and formatting) but the data comes from different places depending on the type of INVOICE that is being printed. Crystal had NO WAY of handling this and it was a major undertaking that would have to be solved. We kept pushing it off until a Software Dealer (the same one that suggested Crystal Reports) suggested we look at Synaptris Inc.

Synaptris had a great stand alone application for analyzing data and writing reports. There Flagship desktop product was $500 per computer. However that gave you everything for designing reports and doing "Advanced Data Analysis" which amounted to an SQL Query Editor on steroids with a great query builder, great aggregating, and charting on the fly. Their report engine was the same old thing. Provided almost exactly what Crystal did. Their basic report viewer was "$99 per computer". This was just to take a report that was already created and view it or print it. Their API was a COM Component (YUCK!!!). I will get into how much I hate COM in another rant. The API only allowed you to specify a report file and preview or print it. hmmmm... I asked them "How do I provide connection information? I want to design a report and they deploy it to my end-users or with my software." They were baffled. "Connection information is part of the report design. We will need to have our programmers customize the API for your needs. How many users do you have? How much do you deploy?" After Major back and forth explaining, it turns out they wanted each and every workstation that might run our point-of-sale to pay them $99 (which they would discount based on how much deployment we had). This included anyone currently using our software and upgrading to a version with their report engine in it. I fought with them tooth and nail on this. Told them that we need a licensing model like Crystal Reports had. I figured that would get them because they even said that Crystal Reports is their biggest competitor. They basically were looking to make $100,000 off of us initially. We even offered to deploy only their viewer and then offer the $500 designer as an upgrade. Nothing. It was simple to see that Synaptris Inc. had NEVER worked with developers which is where at least 75% of the reporting industry's users are at.

During this "negotiation" we went on an all out search for reporting solutions. After a ton of searching we found Stimulsoft (you guys are not easy to find). IT WAS EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD WE WANTED!!!! We pulled up our C# compiler and quickly made an example designer. We were able to provide predefined connection information to the designer from our software for the design process (this keeps users from wondering how to connect to the data). For our more complex reports we are able to pump XML data directly to the designer/engine for highly customized data and lightening quick processing. We can customize EVERYTHING about the designer and previewer. We are able to hook the load and save routines and provide saving to the SQL Server as an option. We are able to provide predefined variables depending on the TYPE of report a person is creating/customizing which allows our program to automatically fill in values which otherwise would require a prompt (date ranges, product categories, Etc). There is Barcode and Label support (which we were using yet another product (List and Label) to provide). There are charts. And the logic we can provide on top of the logic an end-user/report designer can provide make this the most powerful reporting tool we have EVER come across. In fact we will definitely be buying another license for our other developer. Each time I present this tool to our team and have them play with what I've created, we are all more and more impressed with it. I haven't even completely finished the integration with our Point-of-sale application or started moving our current reports into it but it is the best there is. From one developer to another you guys must do nothing except program because this API/Program is light years ahead of everyone else.

A little closer about those Synaptris guys. We went to them and said "Look at Stimulsoft's offering. This is EXACTLY what we are looking for!" and they tried to tell us that each of our users would be paying $800 for your solution and only $99 for theirs. They have NO CLUE what developers need. Stimulsoft is all about the developer. That's where they need to be and so far we have been more than impressed with their service and their product.

John Hamilton
POSitive Software Company

First I have to say 'thank you' to the community here in the forum. You pointed me to the right direction whenever there was a question with the products.

Nothing technical in my second statement. I only want to share my experiences from the last three months with Stimulsoft Reports. We never programmed against such a powerful and easy to use and easy to integrate tool like Stimulsoft Reports. The productivity is impressive. We tried Crystal and others. No other tool was so easy to deploy like yours. You did and do a great job with the products - the community does a great job too.

Thank you.

Gunther Schabus
R&S Software GmbH

First I have to say 'thank you' to the community here in the forum. You pointed me to the right direction whenever there was a question with the products.

Nothing technical in my second statement. I only want to share my experiences from the last three months with Stimulsoft Reports. We never programmed against such a powerful and easy to use and easy to integrate tool like Stimulsoft Reports. The productivity is impressive. We tried Crystal and others. No other tool was so easy to deploy like yours. You did and do a great job with the products - the community does a great job too.

Thank you.

Gunther

Before switching report writers we spent a lot of time studying the different products available on the market. As a result we chose to use Stimulsoft Reports. It offers feature rich reporting, flexibility, source code, etc.

Everything one looks for in a .NET report writer. After purchasing we found that their support was every bit as valuable as their product.

John P. Marshall
I.S. Associates, Inc.

I've used Stimulsoft Reports for a year and I couldn't yet find a report that can't be easily designed with this great tool. It dramatically simplifies the designing process even for complex, multi-page layout reports giving you the ability to forget about the need to put all the data in a unique view or struggling with a great number of subreports! "No more subreports" is what I expect from a modern reporting tool and Stimulsoft Reports keeps its promises. Mix that with a true file-copy deploy (even with click-once) which is not possible with other COM-based tools and a great tech support and the next generation reporting tool is served!

Good job guys.

Andrea Dellepiane
TECH s.r.l.

I'm using Stimulsoft Reports for about one year and I am very pleased with the way its works. We worked with the major and known tools available in the market, but Stimulsoft Report realy makes the diference when it comes to deliver fast, robust and easy to deploy reports.
Great tool.

Rui Marques
TECH s.r.l.

Stimulsoft Reports proved for us as ideal reporting tool. The conditions, which we had placed against a report generator, were the following:

1. Possibility of complete integration into our own program.

2. Full support of .NET objects.

3. Independence of the report generator from the own database connection.

4. Web support.

5. Our customers should have the possibility to customize existing reports or to create a new report and integrate it into our program without the need of adjustments by us.

6. Intuitive design, so that the typical, frequently occurring elements of a report definition can be developed fast.

7. Possibility to create fastidious, complex reports.

8. Dialog forms available as a part of the report generator.
Stimulsoft Reports has converted these conditions in a well-balanced form and offers many useful details, which are proven in practice as very helpful.

Hans-Georg Quade
all in one GmbH

I think Stimulsoft Reports is the best report engine available at this time. Just before I bought Stimulsoft Reports I investigated other engines (DevExpress - Xtrareport, ActiveReport, Crystal Reports) and decided that Stimulsoft Reports was the best. It's the best because:

1. It works;

2. The designer is intuitive, and easy to learn;

3. Allows for all kinds of datasources, especially custom classes, which I use a lot;

4. It is very flexible: regions, multiple databands, subreports, everything is here;

5. Good support, quick response, good handling of bugs.

The one thing I miss is good intellisense support while writing expressions and eventhandlers.

Good luck!

Rene van den Berg
Egosoft B.V.