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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Tableau comparison

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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Read 102 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform reviews
8,854 views|6,867 comparisons
90% willing to recommend
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Tableau

Read 290 Tableau reviews
26,326 views|22,778 comparisons
89% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
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Buyer's Guide
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau
March 2024
Executive Summary

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.
To learn more, read our detailed SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau Report (Updated: March 2024).
Download the complete report
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Q&A Highlights
Question: What are the differences between Tableau and SAP Business Objects?
Answer: Sorry, I do not know Tableau, I know BO just for upgrading old reports. I use Qlikview.
Read more →
Featured Review
Paul Grill
Easy to set up, good reporting, and very efficient
They've made it more efficient and able to respond to both report and ad-hoc requests in a timely fashion. The world still runs on reports. Reports... Read more →
Anonymous User
Researched SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform but chose Tableau: User-friendly, flexible, customizable reports, and the support responds well
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution can scale.""To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user.""Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up.""It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA.""I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution.""The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it.""The solution is stable.""It can process big volumes of data fast."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →

"I believe one of the most valuable features of the solution is trend analysis.""The most valuable features are the visualizations, the way they show the combination charts.""I like the calculation feature. I would not say it's such a good feature in Tableau, but if you have the knowledge, you can make that feature visible to everyone. It's not a feature that we can drag and drop and get the information. But whatever the data, whatever the calculation, I'm able to do. It's basically the knowledge base. Whatever knowledge I have, I can make that information public and publish it for management.""It is very easy to implement and to use.""It has been the best tool to work with from a self-service point of view.""The most valuable feature is the geographic data analysis.""Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors.""The most valuable feature is the drag and drop, then the simplicity to build dashboards which allows us to provide more usable data to our customers."

More Tableau Pros →

Cons
"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.""It is not simple to use.""The initial setup could be simplified.""Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using.""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.""Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution.""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."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →

"Formatting controls could use some improvement.""I would like to have the product be more flexible in terms of creating online shared dashboards.""The price could be better.""It should offer better features for customization.""In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard.""There are more than a powerful tool in the market, such as Microsoft BI.""When I've done presentations in the past, I've had issues with uploading the cartography.""There's no mature ETL tool in Tableau, which is quite a negative for them."

More Tableau Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
  • "​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
  • "It has an option of a Cloud Platform (SAP Analytics Cloud) which has a lower price than the on-premise platform, and you can buy individual licences per user.​"
  • "Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users."
  • "There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
  • "Its price is fair."
  • "It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
  • "I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI."

    • More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "For big business, Tableau could be expensive as having a lot of Tableau server users (entering with a browser to reports) could be a bit expensive."
  • "Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."
  • "Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."
  • "Buy 50 at a time. Project your use base every three months, and project your requirements forward."
  • "Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
  • "I wish there was more of a subscription model with the pricing when it comes to Tableau, so you can get all the latest version upgrades/features if you pay monthly/annually."
  • "The cost is high."
  • "Deployment of dashboards to viewers and unit supervisors can be prohibitively expensive."

    • More Tableau Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
    After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts use to create and share insights. It is also the tool of choice for rapid prototyping of dashboards. Tableau is very flexible with its data import. Tableau's data blending capability is very intuitive. This capability is useful when you have data spread across several different sources that has not gone through ETL processes. This is a problem analysts deal with routinely. They are unable to wait for the data warehouse team to develop ETL processes to provide the physical models they need to build an analysis. The Tableau interface is Excel-like and has a low barrier to entry for analysts that are used to working in Excel. Building a dashboard by mashing up visualizations in a Tableau worksheet is extremely simple. Users are able to build good presentation-quality dashboards in a very short amount time. Tableau's annotations capabilities and its time and geographical intelligence are key differentiators. Tableau has overcome limitations in data sharing with the introduction of a Data Server in Tableau 7.0. The Data server allows Data sources and extracts to be shared securely and opens up interesting new possibilities. If your application can take advantage of the above… Read more →
    Answers from the Community
    Anonymous User
    Question: What are the differences between Tableau and SAP Business Objects?
    it_user77067 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user77067 (Senior Consultant at a tech company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    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

    it_user5598 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user5598 (Senior Director, BI Architecture at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Vendor

    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.

    it_user86880 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user86880 (Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees)
    Vendor

    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.

    it_user116742 - PeerSpot reviewerit_user116742 (Oracle Web Administrator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees)
    Consultant

    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.

    See all 5 answers »
    Questions from the Community
    Seeking lightweight open source BI software
    Top Answer:There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows:  1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle  - look for SAP… more »
    Read all 8 answers   →
    Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualizati...
    Top Answer:Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it… more »
    Read all 18 answers   →
    What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Pla...
    Top Answer:What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
    Read all 39 answers   →
    Seeking lightweight open source BI software
    Top Answer:It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos… more »
    Read all 8 answers   →
    Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
    Top Answer:Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies… more »
    Read all 6 answers   →
    What do you like most about Tableau?
    Top Answer:The platform's most important feature is predictive analysis.
    Read all 125 answers   →
    Ranking
    6th
    out of 108 in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
    Views
    8,854
    Comparisons
    6,867
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    562
    Rating
    7.9
    2nd
    out of 108 in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
    Views
    26,326
    Comparisons
    22,778
    Reviews
    14
    Average Words per Review
    534
    Rating
    8.5
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
    Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
    Learn More
    SAP
    Tableau
    Overview

    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.

    The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.

    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features

    • Central management: Access all your BI from a single, central launchpad that can be customized to meet user-specific needs. The launchpad provides business users with access to all their BI tools, reports, notifications, and applications in a single place. This includes the ability to launch SAP Analytics Cloud.

    • Data visualization and analytics: Create powerful visualizations, dashboards, and applications to assess risk, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and enable users to analyze developments and data. Business insights can be shared with colleagues across enterprises.

    • Integration with Microsoft Office: Integrate with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA to power real-time analytics. For large-scale data analysis, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel to discover in-depth business insights and forecasts. Data analytics information can also be embedded into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

    • Cloud support: Extend and expand your BI on the cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud connects your BI to the cloud and offers enterprise planning and advanced analytics from a single online solution.

    Reviews from Real Users

    SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.

    A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "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."

    An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."

    A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "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. It has great visualization. 

    Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights. 

    Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

    Tableau has many valuable key features:

    • Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
    • Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards. 
    • Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions. 
    • Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data. 
    • Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries. 
    • Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

    Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

    Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”

    Sample Customers
    SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
    Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    Insurance Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    University7%
    Healthcare Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization35%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise47%
    Buyer's Guide
    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau
    March 2024
    Free Report: SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau
    Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    DOWNLOAD NOW
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 290 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 "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". 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, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Databricks. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau report.

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    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.