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.
"You can build once and deploy to multiple operating systems. Also, it resizes in the way you want it to."
"Speed for high level aggregation by using Intelligent Cubes."
"Mobile brings reports/dashboards closer to the business user."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to actually embed actions, comments, being able to leverage Transaction Services to embed the tool into a business process."
"I like the user interface and the experience has been great."
"The simplicity of MicroStrategy is what I like the most."
"The most important feature is the way it handles ad hoc queries and provides formatted reports."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
"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."
"The solution can scale."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."
"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."
"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."
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"There might be opportunities for reporting or data analysis, perhaps even in the realm of simulation."
"Another feature to consider in the future would be adding some additional offline capabilities without using desktops."
"Its price should be lower. In terms of features, what we have is quite encompassing right now."
"Sometimes you can do something in reports, but you cannot do the same thing in documents."
"The pricing could be lower because it is costly."
"The product is designed for enterprise. A lightweight version would be easier for a smaller workgroup."
"I prefer the capabilities of a single platform, but it does not always work. We are a huge company. Some areas do not use MicroStrategy, so you have to blend whatever systems they are using together to get the data points that you are looking for."
"They need to improve on distribution services. There are lack of features which were there earlier with Narrowcast, but they are not there in the distribution services."
"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."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud."
"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products."
"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."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
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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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