I believe report is equivalent to assert false. However, there may be a bigger difference is the way that tools collect coverage data. Usually, you want to know the percentage of assert statements that evaluated true versus the total number of assert statements. And you may want to know the percentage of assert statements that never evaluated true or false. However, report statements are just informational messages with varying severities.
report "This is a basic report...make sure you put this inside a process";
report "This is a report with a severity level which can be used to stop the sim" severity ERROR;