Bold Reports

What it is

Bold Reports is a business intelligence reporting platform for creating, managing and sharing pixel-perfect, paginated reports. It serves a business-user reader and a developer reader at once. Business users build reports themselves in a canvas-based, drag-and-drop designer, and developers embed the same creating, viewing, printing and exporting experience inside their own applications. The company's site says the product is designed for developers, IT teams, ISVs, SaaS providers and enterprises that need to scale reporting.

It has a sibling product, Bold BI, which the company positions for interactive, scrollable analytical dashboards. Bold Reports is the one for fixed-layout documents that are meant to be printed or exported, so it fits the dashboards and BI category from the reporting side rather than the exploration side. The pages do not say where the company is based.

What you build and how

The core output is a paginated report. The company's comparison article says paginated reports suit fixed-layout documents optimized for printing, and that a table can span multiple pages with all the data displayed. The editor is a canvas with WYSIWYG drag-and-drop and pixel-perfect positioning, which the article contrasts with the grid-based layout of Bold BI. The home page promises control over every page break, header, margin and font, so the exported PDF or Excel file matches the template exactly. Barcodes and QR codes are listed as first-class report items.

For data, the comparison article names relational databases, NoSQL databases, cloud data stores and REST API sources, and says custom connectors can be added on request. The home page's FAQ gives SQL, Excel and cloud data sources as examples. Unstructured data such as geo-spatial data, invoices, records and machine learning output can be converted to structured or semi-structured form through extensions so that Bold Reports can render it.

One report item deserves a mention for anyone who has built reports before. The Tablix item combines the functions of table, matrix and list, and the article describes it as the way to organize data into rows and columns for financial statements and similar detailed documents. The article also says the printable format gives complete data drill-down.

Embedding is where the developer audience comes in. The home page lists REST APIs and SDKs for Angular, React, Blazor and .NET, and describes 2 routes: an iframe for a same-day pilot, and deep API embedding for a surface you fully own. Its FAQ adds JavaScript to the supported frameworks and says embeddable viewers are included. The article says you can control every aspect of embedding to fit your application's look and feel, and that you can rebrand Bold Reports and redistribute it your own way.

Hosting is a choice. The company says Bold Reports supports cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployment, and multi-tenant deployments for serving several teams, departments or customers securely. An enterprise report server manages reports, users, permissions and data sources in one place, with role-based access, scheduled distribution and export automation. Authentication options include OAuth and OpenID Connect.

Reports reach readers through several channels. According to the article, users can consume them in a web browser, on desktop, on a mobile device or by email, and reports can be shared with specific users or groups and scheduled for automatic email distribution. The FAQ says reports can be scheduled, exported and delivered through multiple distribution options.

A large part of the pitch is migration. Bold Reports natively supports RDL and RDLC, the file formats SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) uses, so the company says most existing SSRS reports open and render with little to no rework. It says RDL and RDLC reports made with third-party tools can be loaded in Bold Reports and the other way around. For Crystal Reports, an automated converter turns .rpt files into SSRS-compatible RDL, one at a time or in bulk. After conversion you review layout and data, then publish. The company's migration team handles complex reports that need manual attention, and the pitch is to modernize in phases while keeping existing layouts and business processes.

The evidence

The company says Bold Reports offers a free trial to evaluate reporting, embedding and migration capabilities. The pages publish no plan names or prices. 2 licensing statements do appear. The comparison article says licensing is pay-per-application, and the FAQ says there are no per-developer fees. The article also refers to affordable pricing for running Bold BI and Bold Reports together without naming a figure.

Support is described as dedicated support along with detailed documentation, sample projects and onboarding guidance. The FAQ answers the coding question directly: no, business users can build reports with the self-service designer with no coding needed, and developers can use the APIs and SDKs for deeper integration. The article makes a matching claim about the learning curve: no additional learning is needed if you already know SSRS, and the interface lets any user create reports without IT team assistance.

The site leans hard on the Crystal Reports end of life. Its FAQ says SAP is retiring older versions on a schedule, with Crystal Reports 2020 leaving mainstream maintenance in December 2026 and later versions to follow. After that, versions move to extended maintenance, which the page describes as usually pricier, with no new features or platform updates. The page presents Bold Reports as the replacement that adds web-based reporting, embedded reporting, centralized management and flexible deployment.

Security is covered in general terms. The FAQ names role-based access control, authentication options, secure report delivery and OAuth and OpenID Connect support. It names no compliance certification.

2 testimonials sit on the home page. A co-founder and full-stack developer writes that the team switched from SSRS with little effort, that it works well in their WPF and Blazor applications, and that "the pricing is fair for ISVs." A CEO writes that Bold Reports "was easy to integrate" and that the documentation is clear with plenty of helpful examples. These are customer statements published by the vendor, not independent reviews.

Who it suits and who it does not

Bold Reports suits a developer or ISV who wants report creation, viewing and export inside a SaaS product or internal application, particularly in a .NET, Angular, React or Blazor stack. It suits organizations already running SSRS, because the RDL and RDLC support means existing work carries over, and teams leaving Crystal Reports ahead of the maintenance change will find a converter and a migration team described. Finance and operations groups that need documents with exact page layout also match what the editor is built for.

It is not the tool for a team that mainly wants interactive dashboards where viewers explore data visually. The company points those readers to Bold BI, and says it is possible to run both products together. The site publishes no prices, so a buyer has to ask the company, and it names no compliance certifications. A founder with no reporting background and no developer will also find that the strongest features, embedding and migration, assume technical help is nearby.