We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI comes out on top in this comparison. It is reliable and easy to use. In addition, when compared with SAP BusinessObjects, it is easier to set up, less expensive, and has better customer support.
"I have found the best features to be the dashboard creation, graphs, charts, and presentation bar graphs."
"Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes."
"Implementation is very quick and the solution is very user-friendly."
"The best thing about this solution is that it is very user friendly. It is interactive in terms of visualizations. It is very eye-catching, and it attracts users. There are a lot of options to visualize the data in different drafts and views. I have used different visualization tools, and I found Power BI to be more efficient in terms of performance, user-friendliness, and ease of use."
"I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"The user experience is easy. Users get familiar with it quickly."
"It is good for us for onboarding the data. We can connect to multiple data sources, do transformations to make the data usable, and then model it within the transformation. Someone who has come from a Microsoft Excel environment will easily be able to use this solution. Power query and report modeling are easy to understand in this solution. Their technical support is very good. They are extremely responsive, helpful, and hands-on."
"We have found the product to be scalable."
"First of all, visualization tools, productivity, and predictive forecasting are mature."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions. If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up."
"Way of creating reports."
"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution."
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"The formatting template could be improved."
"Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik."
"It is easy enough. I don't see any real substantial improvements that are needed. It is great as it is, but its interface could be a bit modern."
"Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do more in-depth analysis and represent the findings."
"You need to purchase upgraded support separately."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"I think that they can add more types of charts because the selection on the desktop version is limited."
"It should be more user-friendly. There are very small or tiny icons that you need to move very carefully. If you go a little bit up and down, some of the values change. Its user interface should be improved. It should be like Tableau. Its performance is also slow and should be improved. I definitely feel some sort of speed issues with Power BI. The integration of Excel with Power BI would also be good."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."
"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective. It should also be improved in terms of end-user experience. It requires further improvements for usability and ease of use. It should have more dashboarding metrics and much faster integration with ERP so that when you double click, you can instantly see the scenario-based result."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
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Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 103 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Visualization is better than other tools, offers good dashboard and analytics features but it is not easy to adapt to the product". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Qlik Sense, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos, Looker and Oracle Essbase. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
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All the traditional BI platforms including Business Objects and Microsoft Reporting services and Analysis services require IT involvement almost at every step in preparing the data and report.
Self serve BI is the promise to these business analysts without technology background. However following characteristics are a must to meet the self serve BI dream.
- BI tool should be capable of reading data from its source without a dependency on ETL or a warehouse.
- While a dimensional model gives most flexibility for ad hoc data analysis, it brings a overhead of consistent modeling mindset requiring very technical background.
- Ability to convert grid data into visualization and vice versa with few clicks
- Ability to mashup multiple analysis from multiple sources on to a single screen.
- Finally a framework that let's end users seamlessly build their analysis while IT can throttle, govern, audit and scale end user data needs with a great amount of automation behind the scenes as a continuous process as opposed to be a pre process.
Two such platforms I have come across are
1) Tableau
2) CarbonBI
These solutions seem good for Visualizations. I like Pentaho personally. Wondering why the this suggestion hasn't been made??
Sap business objects can provide a sophisticated self service solution that is very easy for the end users to engage with for both ad hoc analysis and report writing and distribution. However as with all Bi solutions the back end data warehouse must be designed intelligently and business objects universes configured correctly. The same thing really applies no matter what toolset you select. If you already have business objects then it makes sense to ask IT to set it up as a self service solution rather than look for another technology. If IT do not have the skills then look for a good consultant to perform a review of your BI solution and make recommendations.
Nick,
Good comments similar to the points I was making. I think that it is still
important to consider how much data you expect to be dealing with, the
tool's analytical architecture (ROLAP or MOLAP), the sophistication of your
analyst end users, and how complex your reports are likely to be. If you
or the analysts expect that solution development is going to be in the
hands of the analyst, then the tool needs to be relatively easy to learn.
On the last point, if you expect a lot of slicing-and-dicing you need an
architecture that will support the high indexing load. Anyway, success and
use acceptance is not just a question of apparent simplicity and seemingly
low cost.
regards,
Keith Breedlove
Polyglot Analytics, LLC
Groveland, FL
I suggest Power Data, the new Microsoft develop.
Try Tableau.
I would suggest looking at Tableau for requirements of self-service nature. The success factor for a self service tool depends on the ease-of-use for the end-user who is less proficient in IT skills and the range of tasks it allows the end user to accomplish. Tableau scores highly on both these parameters. Backed by a well designed data mart, Tableau can be the solution that pretty much allows the end user to replace the need for IT. It has excellent training materials available in one-click and many forums where people are ready share their cool experiences. Developing a report in Tableau for me was more like playing a video game, a throughly enjoyable experience to get to a cool end-product. You want the end-users to cherish the process of creation and Tableau does that with ease.
I would focus on Tableau and MicroStrategy (we went with MSTR several years ago to supplant BO), although QlickView has its proponents for ease of use...