Crystal Reports for VS2012 – free or not?

Question

Since Visual Studio 2010 Crystal Reports are no longer part of Visual Studio. I'm using Visual Studio 2012 Professional and despite checking various sources I cannot reliably determine whether I can

1. freely download and use Crystal Reports Developer version for development of commercial applications in Visual Studio 2012

2. freely distribute and install Crystal Reports Runtime for running apps (developed above) at clients

In other words, do I need to purchase a license or not? Do clients need purchase their licenses, too?

(Besides your answer, providing link to sources of information will be appreciated.)

FYI - For obtaining Crystal Reports, there is a great resource containing all versions and package types, but still leaving me without the answer.

Answer 1

It seems that Crystal Reports licensing depends on many factors. There is a blog from an SAP employee: "SAP Crystal Licensing for Humans" which puts the information together and covers most cases. The entire simplified licensing whitepaper referred there has 20 pages. Currently the document is up-to-date also for 2013 releases.

Based on the above document (esp. page 4) the answer is that

SAP Crystal Reports for Visual Studio is free if Crystal Reports is used

• internally in company (external users can also access, but no access fee can be charged to them)

-or-

• with runtime engine deployed only on client machines, i.e. all report processing is done locally on client machine. Also no parallel access to such a client runtime is allowed (also including Citrix or Remote Desktop usage).

For additional information, please check that document.

Answer 2

Yes, basic solutions, that allow a developer to generate and deploy reports, are free.
Advanced solutions, that allow end user to create, edit and share reports are not free.

• It is free the IDE to be used with Visual Studio; stand alone full IDE is not free

• Crystal Reports Runtime for running apps is free. SAP Crystal Server is not free.

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EDIT

Look at this article: How do you spell confusion; CR for VS, Crystal 2011, BI 4.x and the .NET SDKs

And "Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010" (CRVS2010) is born. Note that this version, follows in the footsteps of CR 10.5; it only works in the VS 2010 IDE. E.g.; it is not a stand alone executable like CR XI R2 or CR 2008. CRVS 2010 has both 32 bit and 64 bit runtime. And it has the Crystal Reports SDK for .NET as well as the InProc RAS SDK. And it's FREE(!).

Answer 3

Please see this post and the licensing information from SAP here to answer your questions. Basically the answer to both questions is "Yes". You can download the developer version here.