Telerik Reporting Alternative: Code-First PDFs in .NET

We keep hearing a version of the same question from .NET teams: the Telerik Reporting renewal is coming up, and most of what the team actually needs is to turn this data into a clean PDF. Is there something simpler?

Full disclosure: we work on IronPDF at Iron Software. We'll be upfront about where our tool wins and where Telerik Reporting still wins.

Here's our honest take up front: IronPDF is a strong alternative when your reports can be expressed as HTML and CSS and you want code-first control. It's not a drop-in clone. Telerik Reporting is a visual, banded report platform; IronPDF is an HTML-to-PDF engine. Once that distinction clicks, the decision gets a lot easier.

Here's the whole "hello, report" example. One NuGet package is the entire dependency:

// Program.cs (.NET 10, top-level statements)
using IronPdf;

License.LicenseKey = "YOUR-LICENSE-KEY"; // a free 30-day trial key works here

var renderer = new ChromePdfRenderer();
var pdf = renderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf("<h1>Q3 Sales Report</h1><p>Generated with IronPDF.</p>");
pdf.SaveAs("report.pdf");

ChromePdfRenderer spins up an embedded Chromium engine and renders that markup the way a browser would. No report server, no designer file, no viewer runtime. That's the trade you're evaluating, so let's break it down.

We've walked plenty of teams through this exact evaluation, and it almost always comes down to one question: is your report really a document, or does it need to stay interactive?

Why Teams Go Looking for an Alternative

Most teams don't leave Telerik Reporting because it's bad. They leave because of fit. Telerik Reporting is a feature-complete embedded reporting suite, and it carries the weight of one. Here's what our conversations with developers turn up most often:

• Licensing and bundling. Telerik Reporting starts around $499 per developer per year, often bundled inside the larger DevCraft suite. If reporting is the only piece you use, you're paying for a lot of product you don't touch.
• The banded-designer model. Telerik's power comes from WYSIWYG designers and .trdp/.trdx definition files, great for report specialists and end-user self-service but friction for a team that lives in source control and CI/CD, where a binary report definition is hard to diff and test.
• Legacy surface area. The engine grew up in the Windows Forms and Web Forms era and has been extended forward to ASP.NET Core and Blazor, which means viewers, REST report services, and designer tooling to deploy and version.

None of that makes Telerik the wrong choice. It makes it a heavy choice for teams whose real requirement is a clean PDF. That's the gap IronPDF fills.

Telerik Reporting vs. IronPDF at a Glance

We've tried to keep this table fair: notice how many rows Telerik wins.F

Capability	Telerik Reporting	IronPDF
Report authoring model	Visual banded designers	Code + HTML / CSS / Razor
End-user self-service authoring	Yes (Web Report Designer)	No
Interactive report viewer	Yes (drill-down, sort, parameters)	No, outputs a static PDF
HTML / CSS / JS rendering fidelity	Limited	Chromium-accurate
Export formats	PDF, Excel, Word, PPT, CSV, RTF, images	PDF (plus raster images)
PDF manipulation (merge, sign, PDF/A, PDF/UA)	Basic	Extensive
Deployment footprint	Engine + optional REST service + viewers	Single NuGet package
Cross-platform (Linux / Docker / macOS)	Partial	Full
Licensing	From ~$499/yr per dev, royalty-free	Perpetual, per developer, royalty-free

Telerik leads on authoring and export breadth; IronPDF leads on rendering fidelity, PDF control, and deployment.

What Telerik Reporting Still Does Well

We'd be doing you a disservice if we glossed over this: there are jobs where Telerik Reporting is the better answer.

Its three WYSIWYG designers (Visual Studio, standalone desktop, and web) let non-developers build and adjust reports, self-service that an HTML-to-PDF library doesn't offer. The Report Viewer controls are the other big win: interactive viewers across HTML5, ASP.NET Core, Blazor, Angular, React, WPF, and WinForms, complete with drill-down, sorting, and parameter prompts. One report definition can export to PDF, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, CSV, RTF, and images.

If your business analysts author their own reports, or you need an in-app interactive viewer, keep Telerik. That's a genuine platform need IronPDF doesn't cover.

Where IronPDF Fits Better

IronPDF wins when your report is really a document, and you'd rather build it with the web skills your team already has. We see this pattern constantly: an invoice, a statement, or a compliance packet that was forced into a banded designer when it was a web page all along.

Because ChromePdfRenderer is Chromium under the hood, your report is styled with the same HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript a browser uses: Flexbox, Grid, web fonts, SVG charts, print media queries. You can reuse an existing invoice or dashboard template instead of rebuilding it in a proprietary designer.

Everything is code, so everything is testable and diffable. Your template lives in the repo, goes through code review, and runs in CI. Deployment is a single NuGet package (no report server, no viewer runtime), and it runs the same on Windows, Linux, macOS, Docker, and Azure.

IronPDF is also a full PDF toolkit, not just a renderer: merge and split documents, add headers/footers/watermarks, fill forms, digitally sign (including HSM tokens as of the late-2025 releases), and produce PDF/A and PDF/UA compliant output.

Here's the gotcha to know up front: IronPDF has no visual designer, no end-user self-service authoring, and no interactive viewer. It produces a finished PDF, full stop. Its export is PDF-first; for native Excel or Word output, that's a job for IronXL or IronWord, not IronPDF.

A Real Report in C#

Enough theory. Here's a data-driven report with a running footer and automatic page numbers, the banded-report feature people worry about losing:

// QuarterlySalesReport.cs (.NET 10)
using IronPdf;
using System.Text;

// rows would come from EF Core, Dapper, or any data layer you already have
var rows = new[]
{
    new { Product = "Wireless Mouse",      Units = 1240, Revenue = 30_876.00m },
    new { Product = "Mechanical Keyboard", Units = 860,  Revenue = 51_540.00m },
    new { Product = "USB-C Hub",           Units = 2110, Revenue = 42_411.00m },
};

var body = new StringBuilder(
    "<h1>Quarterly Sales</h1>" +
    "<table><thead><tr><th>Product</th><th>Units</th><th>Revenue</th></tr></thead><tbody>");

foreach (var r in rows)
    body.Append($"<tr><td>{r.Product}</td><td>{r.Units:N0}</td><td>{r.Revenue:C}</td></tr>");

body.Append("</tbody></table>");

var renderer = new ChromePdfRenderer();

renderer.RenderingOptions.TextFooter = new TextHeaderFooter
{
    LeftText        = "Confidential - Contoso Ltd.",
    RightText       = "Page {page} of {total-pages}",
    DrawDividerLine = true
};
renderer.RenderingOptions.MarginTop = 20;
renderer.RenderingOptions.PaperSize = IronPdf.Rendering.PdfPaperSize.A4;

var pdf = renderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf(body.ToString());
pdf.SaveAs("quarterly-sales.pdf");

TextHeaderFooter gives you the running header/footer band; {page} and {total-pages} are resolved per page at render time, so pagination is handled for you. For richer layouts, swap TextFooter for HtmlFooter (an HtmlHeaderFooter) and use full markup. The C# PDF reports guide and headers and footers how-to go deeper on both.

Migrating From Telerik Reporting

A migration is mostly a translation exercise: most Telerik concepts have an IronPDF equivalent that lives in a different place.

• Visual report definition (.trdp/.trdx) → HTML/CSS or Razor template in your project
• Report band (page header/footer) → TextHeader/HtmlHeader + CSS @page rules
• ObjectDataSource/SqlDataSource → your existing EF Core/Dapper query feeding the template
• ReportProcessor.RenderReport("PDF", ...) → ChromePdfRenderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf(...)
• Report Viewer control → serve pdf.BinaryData (or embed a JS PDF viewer)
• Export to Excel/Word → IronXL/IronWord (separate libraries)

The server-side render is the part people expect to be hard. In IronPDF, the "definition" is your template method, and the render is one call. Here it is as a minimal API endpoint that streams the PDF back, the job the Report Viewer used to do:

// ASP.NET Core minimal API (.NET 10)
app.MapGet("/reports/sales/{quarter}", (string quarter) =>
{
    var html = SalesReportTemplate.Build(quarter); // your template + data query
    var pdf  = new ChromePdfRenderer().RenderHtmlAsPdf(html);
    return Results.File(pdf.BinaryData, "application/pdf", $"sales-{quarter}.pdf");
});

pdf.BinaryData is the rendered byte[], so returning it from a controller, a Blazor endpoint, or a background job is trivial. Report parameters become ordinary method arguments. If your Telerik reports were CSHTML-adjacent already, IronPDF's Razor and MVC rendering lets you render views directly. The one part with no automatic equivalent is multi-format export; plan to route Excel and Word output to IronXL and IronWord.

Licensing, in Plain Terms

Telerik Reporting is royalty-free and starts near $499 per developer per year, with unlimited application and server deployment. That's predictable, and it scales cleanly with team size, though it recurs and is frequently bundled inside DevCraft.

IronPDF uses a perpetual, per-developer license instead of a per-seat subscription: a one-time purchase with a fully functional 30-day free trial and free use during development. Deployment to your own test, staging, and production servers is included; redistributing IronPDF inside a product you ship to third parties uses a separate OEM add-on. Check current tiers on the IronPDF licensing page.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Telerik Reporting if non-developers author reports, you need an interactive in-app viewer with drill-down and parameters, or one definition must export to Excel, Word, and PowerPoint as well as PDF.

Choose IronPDF if your reports are documents, you'd rather build them in HTML/CSS/Razor and keep everything in source control, you deploy to Linux, Docker, or Azure, or you want deep PDF manipulation from a single package.

Our advice, distilled: don't migrate a platform to a library and expect feature parity. Migrate the reports that are really documents, and you'll wonder why they ever needed more.

What's the report in your app that's secretly just a PDF waiting to happen? Tell us what you're migrating in the comments.