Sage Advanced vs Premium

Question

We are planning to upgrade Standard to Premium based on the assumption that Premium is comparable (or not much slower than) to Advanced in terms of data input and reporting speed. Standard is very slow and painful to use, so our team needs better performance in terms of data input, research inquiry, and reporting speed. I've read that Advanced is a little but faster than Premium (especially for for data input), but have not seen for myself or not found any data (which sage took down) that shows how much of a difference there is. Has anyone seen the difference for themselves? Aside from the additional cost for SQL licenses, is there any other reason to upgrade to Advanced over Premium? Thanks!

Kevin M · Answer

BigLouie knows this better than I do, but I believe the transactional benefits of Advanced vs Premium are measured in fractions of a second, and depend on your hardware / system tuning If you are running imports with 1000's of records, you might want to do some performance testing to compare. Normal users clicking through screens shouldn't notice a difference. 
 Standard is fine for a very small number of users with limited data and a fast network, but because each workstation edits the raw data files over the network (instead of there being a "service" doing that work) it will always be the slowest of the three. 
 Performance of custom reports on Premium is light years faster than Standard / Advanced. There is no debate on this. SQL is king here. On top of that, with Premium, the core data files are locked by SQL server, and can't be encrypted by crypto if a workstation is infected. 
 If you are on the subscription license I believe you can currently switch between the three freely. You can try Premium, and if you want to go back down to Advanced after that, DSD has an enhancement to allow that data conversion. Going with Advanced first, then choosing to try Premium later... can be done without 3rd party software.

BigLouie · Answer

Good information. Sage use to have a white paper on the processing speed of all three versions but I can't find it anymore but I do remember that Advanced was measurably faster than Premium. 
 
 I would advise you to do a test install on Premium first and see what issues you run into before you totally commit.

Wayne Schulz · Answer

The only reason I'd go Advanced over Premium is if I didn't have or want to set up SQL If you are doing any external reporting using Crystal or other tools and are concerned about speed you will want to go SQL.

Kevin M · Answer

I'd do a test install of Premium, and see if that gives acceptable performance. (You can't install more than one flavor of Sage, of the same version, on the same server). 
 SQL has a "Developer" license, which you can probably use for testing (as long as the environment is not used for anything else).

Sage 100

Sage Advanced vs Premium

Top Replies

COMMUNITY

COMPANY

PARTNERS

SUPPORT & TRAINING