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Windward Core vs Yellowfin comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Windward Core
Ranking in Reporting
23rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Document Generation Tools (1st)
Yellowfin
Ranking in Reporting
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (44th), Data Visualization (26th), Embedded BI (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Windward Core is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

CH
Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting
The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.
AC
It is a central source of up-to-date data and information, but needs more charting capabilities
Management information Reporting Statistics Data analysis It reduces sending copies of different report/spreadsheet versions over email, which makes it difficult to access the right report. It is also able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout.  All management…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Another thing our clients absolutely love is the ability to design templates within the Microsoft Office suite, because of how simple it is. They're building off of something that's familiar. When they can build off of that feature, on top of something that's very familiar, that's a plus for them."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."
"​A useful, ​easy to use product, which has a lot of features for designing reports."
"Thanks to Windward, our documents need very few tweaks and are usually "customer-ready" right out of the box."
"Windward helped automate reports which otherwise would have needed IT to create and maintain."
"AutoTag is valuable because it integrates with MS Word and makes it easy for our users to create template documents and reports. It allows our users to design the templates based on differing needs."
"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."
"It's easy to create templates and reports using Microsoft Word, so we don't have to learn something new to create a template. That makes it very user-friendly... they have integrated the product with Microsoft Word. People can easily start working on it without too much training."
"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."
"It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
 

Cons

"There are some Excel formatting things that you lose when you implement a template: some default Excel validation scripts, macros. You could create them in Excel if you were just using Excel, but in creating a template that generates a report, some of those validation things are lost."
"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."
"The next release could benefit from a cloud-based environment."
"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"They're not a gigantic company, so they just don't have all the capital to do whatever they would want to do. That's the only reason I would hold back even that one point. I know that if I do ask for something, I'll get it. I just know that it will take some time."
"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost is reasonable."
"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."
"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."
"Windward is very expensive when the volume of documents being generated is low and it is cheap when the volume is high."
"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."
"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."
"Pricing is a bit higher than normal desktop applications, but it's well worth it. The ROI is simple to understand and the monthly payment for an annual license is affordable and worth it."
"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Also Known As

Windward, Windward Studios
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt
NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores
Find out what your peers are saying about Windward Core vs. Yellowfin and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,484 professionals have used our research since 2012.