Choosing between Crystal Reports 2013 and Crystal Reports for

Enterprise
In general if you are currently using Crystal Reports 2013 and you want to use the BI semantic layer and BI4.x platform
then choose SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise. If you require report creation API, SAP ERP direct table access then
SAP Crystal Reports 2013 is the version of choice.
SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise is the foundation for future versions. In BI 4.x you can choose to use both
versions depending on features and data connectivity needed.
SAP Crystal Reports 2013 and SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise can run side by side on the same desktop client.
The following table summarizes general recommendations on which version to use based on the data access required:

Data Source

General Recommendation

SAP BusinessObjects BI4.x relational universe (unx), olap universe (unx)

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

SAP NetWeaver BW 7 (BICS)

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Analysis Views

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

SAP NetWeaver BW 3.5

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

Business Views

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

Direct RDBMS or OLAP access

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP ERP

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

Live Office

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP Crystal Reports 2013 vs. SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise
Data connectivity
Data source

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Direct data access drivers (RDBMS)

direct access to major DB vendors

Direct data access drivers (OLAP)

only BEx queries

ODBC, JDBC
Legacy universes (unv)

limited

Universes (unx)
Business Views
Analysis Views

only for cascading prompts

Data source

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Direct JDBC/ODBC access to

HANA.
Refer to the following article:
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-39420
Direct data access to Hadoop

User interface

User

SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Same as Crystal Reports 2008/2011

New interface i.e. tabbed toolbar, smart guidelines, smart default formatting

interface

BI 4.x platform
SAP Crystal Reports 2013

SAP Crystal Reports for Enterprise

Processing servers

32 bit

Native 64 bit

Platform alerting

Not available

Alerts are leveraging BI4.x platform alerting framework

framework