Advanced is the fastest in terms of processing speed. Premium and Standard are about the same in processing speed.  All are same for data input. Premium is fastest for reporting speed.  Honestly I would stay with Advanced.  I am sure Kevin has better input and thoughts.

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.

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.

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.

I've read that Sage had a data (or whitepaper) showing Advanced was faster than Premium but Sage took this data / white paper off the internet. 

Thanks for your responses. We want to upgrade asap with very limited resources  to upgrade, and want to make sure we do not go the wrong direction. 

In that case do a test install of each and post a large batch and see the results.  You should work with your reseller and do a test install of Advanced and Premium and migrate data and see what issues come up.

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).

how time consuming (or expensive for a consulting firm) is it to set up a test install of each?  We do not want to pay for two implementations, but if it's just as easy to set up both simultaneously, it's a great idea. 

The decision is on hold because we learned Premium does not allow MRP, which is a problem because the new inventory management IRP module does not allow for parts forecasting.