We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, and SAP Crystal Reports based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."
"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."
"PowerBi is used to import our production data and generate dashboards, then integrates other Excel sheets to provide managers dashboards. This helps them get insights to make better OEE improvement decisions, mainly where to focus resources. We became able to see indicators from any time frame (day, week, month, or year), then could make better decisions."
"The dashboards of Microsoft BI are easy to use."
"The product is stable."
"The most valuable feature of Microsoft BI is its visualization and its ease of use."
"Its visualization capabilities are pretty good. It is very easy to use. You can easily make your dashboard."
"In the early stage of an implementation, it not only helps decision making, but it allows people to have insight into problems with data so that they can go and get it corrected."
"I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution."
"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."
"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."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"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."
"It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"This reporting and broadcasting solution has a lot of flexibilities and can connect to multiple source systems."
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"The most valuable feature is that from a user's point of view, it is easy to use and requires just a simple click to generate a report."
"We use SAP Crystal Reports for operational reporting."
"The initial setup of the solution is pretty easy."
"SAP Crystal Reports offers a plethora of features, many of which were available much earlier than in the Crystal Reports we previously used. We extensively use its capabilities for generating general reports, working with Kaspersky data, and even incorporating images into our reports. The range of functions available in SAP Crystal Reports is diverse, and we leverage them across various systems for our needs."
"I find Crystal Reports very easy to use, even for a non-technical person."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a fantastic way of generating reports."
"It is an user-friendly solution."
"One opportunity for improvement would be on the Power Query side. As a consultant, I know Power Query is not the main strength of Power BI. It is not where Power BI shines, but many customers use Power Query to do full ETL workloads for deliverable cookies."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"The solution doesn't integrate well with third-party tools."
"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."
"The reporting could be a bit better."
"At times, I feel that the system needs improvement in single sign-on, especially for the on-premises side of the tool."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface with Microsoft BI."
"There are some problems with the functionality of this solution. The dashboard is not very user friendly and is quite complicated."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"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."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."
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"If at all possible, a little bit of improvement on the analytical side is needed."
"SAP Crystal Reports has some compatibility issues with third-party products."
"There could be improvements made to the analytics capabilities."
"It has significantly enhanced security features, especially when compared to the standard security features of the earlier PeerSpot version I purchased. I've observed improvements in security, and overall, it's quite commendable. Regarding potential enhancements for the next release of this solution, I haven't closely examined SAP Crystal Reports 53. I've only encountered it briefly, perhaps once or twice. However, I anticipate that it likely offers advanced features distinct from its predecessor. I believe there may be notable improvements and additions in the latest version, and I look forward to exploring them further."
"SAP Crystal Reports should provide better support for dynamic connectors."
"The financing part needs improvement."
"A real improvement would be a simpler system that allows users to play with the visualization without needing specialized skills and code."
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