We performed a comparison between SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves. It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable."
"The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation."
"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."
"It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
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"The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts."
"It is so easy to do a lot of things. There is a lot of flexibility and creativity in this product. In other products, you don't have this flexibility."
"Tableau's most valuable features are user-friendliness and have a connection between multiple source systems. You can publish a report by using Tableau Public and there you can make your data online, not only batches of data, you can use it as an online analytical tool."
"A valuable feature of Tableau is that it is a useful tool for small setups. I shuffle between Tableau and MicroStrategy, so I use Tableau for personal purposes more than enterprise. I like the light version of Tableau for personal usage and doing some use cases on my own. When it comes to something small, I use Tableau for setups, rather than any other tool."
"Partner support is very good."
"It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent."
"It’s good for quick visualization and being able to quickly consume unstructured data to play around with."
"The solution allows for the possibility for end-users to do their own reporting."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"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."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
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"When it comes to large datasets, the data should be extracted faster."
"It needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need."
"A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security."
"If you mainly need a tool for BI reporting, it's not the best option. Tableau needs better abilities to generate simple reports, integrate, create databases, and work with data lakes."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"The product's features for cloud integration need improvement."
"The Hyper Extract functionality is not as strong as that provided by Microsoft SQL."
"Tableau could be improved by introducing a data manipulation layer within the tool itself. Currently, data manipulations require using additional tools like Alteryx. If Tableau included these capabilities, it would reduce the need for external dependencies. The tool gets slower when we feed huge amounts of data."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 103 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 reviews. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8, while Tableau is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Oracle Analytics Cloud, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Domo, Amazon QuickSight, SAS Visual Analytics and Databricks. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau report.
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Basically and besides for some differences between tools, Business Objects has "direct access" to data allocated on SAP DBs, since SAP storage has its own data structure and even its own indexes and the DBMS are used just as a repository or mapping tool. This means that access to SAP data is not a trivial task.
I don't remember at this moment if Tableau has interface modules with SAP but anyways my advice is: If you are using SAP ERP and technology then you have a big budget for your project and therefore just use the "native" tools that will let you access to SAP easily. If you are playing as a BI Consultant and needs to access SAP at a lower cost try Arcplan instead that have direct SAP connectors. Otherwise if you just need data mining on a regular DW or a set of application tables you should use Tableau, Qlikview or Arcplan -my favorites.
Regards,
Marcelo
Tableau and Business Objects come from two different (although overlapping) segments of the BI space. BO is an enterprise BI platform and Tableau is a data discovery tool.
Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer comparable to a BO Universe, this is both a strength and a weakness. The user connects directly to the data sources and is exposed to the schemas in their native form. The advantage is that the user can be completely self-sufficient, all they need from IT is data access. And they don’t need to know much about the data before they can start exploring it. Tableau is also very good at data visualization.
We use both Microstrategy and Tableau, the former is comparable to BO. We have a number users who use both tools.
Tableau is a data exploration and visualization tool with an in memory
feature. There is no middle layer like BO (universe). BO is an enterprise
product and so many tools falls under the umbrella. Xcelcius can be
equivalent to Tableau ....
In Tableau you create your own data sources with the help of odbc. Just
like Crystal Reports. The advantage being that Tableau compresses and stores its data internally in a compressed format and through the In memory feature its quite faster.
You can create your own hierarchies on the fly, can do any amount of
analysis on data visualization, drilling is very easy and it's very user
friendly.
As it's a visualization and exploration solution ... You can't have basic styles like
section breaks of BO.
Beginning with version 7.0.4, Tableau supports connecting directly SAP® Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) using the Tableau SAP BW connector. The Tableau SAP BW connector uses the OLE DB for OLAP provider and issues live queries to SAP BW using the MDX query language. One benefit to this type of connection is that you will always connect to the latest data. Additionally, the connection experience is very similar to using Tableau with other OLAP data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase. Beginning with Tableau 8.1 the Tableau SAP BW connector also supports data connections using extracts. For more information about using SAP BW extracts, see SAP BW Extract limitations.