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.
"The solution's platform analytics gives us real-time analysis of how a particular user uses the report and how the systems behave."
"It is scalable and integration-friendly."
"Visual Insight gives you the capability of doing self-service analytics. This has been the most powerful and valuable feature."
"Stability is great, especially with package deployments. It is very consistent and stable."
"We've made it an open BI platform, so that all our business analysts can build their own dashboards and Dossiers."
"Comprehensive security control and more."
"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."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports."
"The Dynamic HTML (DHTML) client option of Webi has been enhanced adding features that were previously only available with the Java client including conditional formatting and support of XLS as a data provider."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features."
"It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →
"If you do not learn the ins or outs, it can be a difficult tool to use. You could do a PoC and get enough out of it to be able to use it. However, when it comes to administering it, you definitely need the training."
"The problem is the way that their metrics are designed. It can be difficult to understand what you're actually looking at. Then when you're comparing a document against the VI, you can't actually do that properly. So there are components, and there is a huge learning curve in the Enterprise Manager space. I think it would benefit them greatly if they were to exercise a significant amount of research and development in that space."
"It is actually pretty complicated to use. It is complicated enough that user adaptation is sometimes difficult. We developed more experts rather than people using it."
"In the developer, there are things that you able to do in a document or a report that you are not able to do in the Dossier."
"MicroStrategy is dragging behind other tools on the self-service visualizations, like Tableau. I would rate Tableau as a 10. For the same visualizations, I would say MicroStrategy is an eight, maybe nine. They're still behind on the self-service visualizations,"
"You can now do data blending at the document level and data blending allows you to show results from different data sets in one grid, so to speak. I want to be able to create a data set that can receive data from multiple cubes, have it in one data set, and then bring it to the document, because then I can reuse it for other documents. Now, I have to do it in a document and then it's less reusable, because if I want to share that functionality, I have to copy the document, strip a lot of things, and then work on that basic element that I've built in that document."
"We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time."
"The solution's reports are not very flexible."
"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."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
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.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.