We performed a comparison between MicroStrategy 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: MicroStrategy is the winner in this comparison. It is a robust, mature solution that receives high marks for its ease of use. In contrast, some SAP BusinessObjects reviewers note that its interface is lacking.
"Reports are very easy to create. It takes a very short amount of time to build a report, which is very useful."
"The whole repository side of things is beneficial because you develop it once, and you can use it anywhere, in the Enterprise grade."
"It's an open platform. That's also important. You can create your own data connectors. There's everything you can do with APIs. It's not closed like, perhaps, an SAP system might be."
"With all the APIs it's very scalable."
"The product is very mature. It's quite robust and an excellent enterprise-level solution."
"The drill-down functionality is also very good."
"The architecture is very solid."
"The dashboard features and functionalities that come through the MicroStrategy Suite are the most valuable. It can be used by end users with minimum knowledge of the product. They can run a report or create a dashboard on their phones, which is kind of cool."
"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."
"We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management."
"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."
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"It crashes multiple times for even small changes that I make on the fly in the dashboard. After doing all the necessary changes, the MicroStrategy desktop or even the web version kicks the users out, and all the changes are lost. This functionality is buggy in MicroStrategy. It is hard to keep track of all the changes that I have done before. I don't want to make copies of each change that I have made because I would end up creating a hundred dashboards. It is not feasible in a real environment. I haven't worked on integrating MicroStrategy with the cloud. I am not sure how it behaves in the cloud, but I have heard from a few of my friends that there are some hiccups when you kind of sync to the cloud through MicroStrategy."
"The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern."
"The analytic speed would probably be what I would look for in terms of improvement because we have super huge data, and if I do not build views on top of data, then reports render really slowly."
"Lacks decent visualization and the process for creating new objects needs to be simplified."
"When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry."
"I think they're still lacking on customer service. I think historically, MicroStrategy's customer service was a lot better than it is today."
"One of the things that I want to see MicroStrategy do is become more cloud native. Right now, the deployment on cloud is very easy to ruin, it is very much like spinning up separate VMs."
"The solution has a very non-logical user usage part. It has a library mode where users can access all the data, reports, and dashboards, but they also can be accessed from a platform. They have to log into the platform. The user experience is confusing for the users. MicroStrategy needs to define which one they will use. Some functionality isn’t available in library mode but is available in the portal. There should be Office integration. For example, if I do a presentation, then I should be able to add a chart to my presentation."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive. If you deal with a huge amount of data, you can go with BusinessObjects. However, if you are a medium-sized company with a modest amount of data, you can opt for another solution."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"Most of the Apps right now are into dashboarding. This tool, for the Crystal Reports in the phase I'm primarily working on, does not have those dashboarding capabilities, like in the other advanced tools like Power BI or ClickView, and compared to them the dashboard generation is not that great."
"They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense."
"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."
"There is still a lot to be done on the mobile side to make Web Intelligence truly seamless between the desktop and mobile versions and I would like to see SAP pay a lot more attention to this."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
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MicroStrategy is ranked 9th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 155 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews. MicroStrategy is rated 8.2, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of MicroStrategy writes "A robust solution for powerful data analytics". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". MicroStrategy is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, IBM Cognos, Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Looker. See our MicroStrategy vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
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