Qlik Sense vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Qlik Sense and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Visualization solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Qlik Sense vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Report (Updated: January 2023).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The drag-and-drop dashboard builder is an intuitive interface for building dashboards from source reports.""It has improved our organization by providing data to decision-makers in a safe visual environment.""The extensibility of the Platform with either internally created extensions or the use of third-party provided items really opens the platform up.""Qlik Sense has a modern look and feel and a very intuitive UI, so non-technical users find it very user friendly.""The number of visualizations that are present in Qlik is very useful for our developers to help our business partners tell stories with their data. Qlik continues to add to and enhance these visualizations with each release. We are also very excited to leverage the integration between Qlik Sense and Qlik Catalog as we roll that out soon.""This tool not only allows for consumption of the data in a visual way, but also allows the user to modify the question to get new answers.""For a deployment scenario, Qlik Sense is also very easy to use. I can start development from any platform, on-premise or cloud, and continue from where I left off.""The product responds fast for data analysis."

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"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting.""The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all dashboards with self-service BI and are able to provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs.""The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation.""We find the product to be very stable.""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.""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.""I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution.""Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up."

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Cons
"Areas for improvement include user-friendliness, self-service, and some of the visualization options for generating reports.""Dates. My goodness, working with dates in set analysis can be a nightmare! Much room for improvement.""Performing data transformations required a lot of programming, which is something that should be made easier.""Qlik has a fast learning curve due to great online training resources (Qlik continuous classroom), but those are lacking the advance features like building extensions and using the API.""The management console appearance needs improvement to its look.""The only thing I would say that comes up is that sometimes it can be a bit buggy.""The product could be less expensive.""It's going to take 20 to 30 minutes to refresh sometimes."

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"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user.""The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now.""Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex.""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.""I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement.""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.""Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix.""The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The solution is worth it."
  • "Understand the break over price point for switching to the Enterprise license."
  • "Licensing could be cheaper."
  • "Licensing: Review the named model and move towards a usage model (e.g., cores, memory, computers, API calls, etc.)."
  • "The cost is not bad considering the flexibility and support you receive from Qlik. I believe it is worth the cost."
  • "Start small with tokens. You can always buy more."
  • "Currently, our ROI is clear and concise decision-making. This timely addition will easily add $15 million to our bottom line in 2017."
  • "You will spend more time on educating your staff than licensing the product."
  • More Qlik Sense 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 →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    A quick look at the whole idea on another weblogs gives you a sense that all of them just talked about very brief things like report refresh feature in BO or cube feature in MS Analysis Service. I choose MS BI and I want to share my reasons and opinions on why I choose it and give you another quick but a little deeper compare on these two BI platforms. As we all know both Business Objects and Microsoft are big companies who are working on BI solutions and both have their own advantages. It’s not true to compare them in term of which one is better, we have to check what is our requirements and then depend on requirements take the decision whether MS or BO. A vision like this could help us relief from religious decisions against a software or technology. In a BI architect first of all we have the data store level, I mean the storage of the raw data not the stage or olap cubes or universe data source, I mean the first place of our data. This is important to know that where your raw data is and what is the type of storage used to store them. Whether file system or Access or Fox database or a complex database solution like oracle, sqlserver or a web service can made our place of raw data. We have to check our tools against them; check to see which one gives us a smooth way to transfer them among ETL process to destination. So take a look at what Business Objects gives us. There is a Data Integration platform in Business objects but the problem is that you have to buy that… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    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 »
    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 »
    Top Answer:The most valuable features of Qlik Sense are its speed and seamless development of web technologies.
    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 »
    Top Answer:What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
    Top Answer:The licensing cost for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform can be significant due to its complexity. It is crucial for customers to carefully assess the value they expect to derive from the… more »
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 70 in Data Visualization
    Views
    5,548
    Comparisons
    3,400
    Reviews
    22
    Average Words per Review
    563
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    8,854
    Comparisons
    6,867
    Reviews
    15
    Average Words per Review
    562
    Rating
    7.9
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    QlikSense
    SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
    Learn More
    Overview

    Qlik Sense is a visual analytics and business intelligence (BI) platform that gives users full control over their system’s data. From this platform they can control every aspect of their system data. It maximizes an organization’s ability to make decisions driven by their data.

    Benefits of Qlik Sense

    Some of the benefits of using Qlik Sense include:

    • Easily manipulate data: Qlik Sense allows users to easily combine and otherwise manipulate their system’s data. It allows them to create interactive visual representations of your datasets. The many different ways that the data can be represented offer many potential options for how to analyze the data. These choices enable users to easily gain critical insights.
    • Easily automate alerts and routine actions: Qlik Sense enables users to keep a close eye on their data. Automatic alerts that will notify them if their data changes in any way. Users don’t need expert knowledge of coding to create automated data-driven events. Users of all experience levels can take advantage of this benefit. Qlik Sense enables routine actions to be automated when necessary data insights will spur the system to take action. This combination of analytics and other tools empower users to take charge of their data.
    • Customize reporting: Users can set Qlik Sense to generate custom reports. These reports can also be customized to be shared by way of one of several methods, allowing users to control who sees their data and what they see.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Qlik Sense stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its associative analytics technology and its remote access capability. Qlik Sense employs an associative analytics engine that gives users the ability to take their data analytics to the next level. Users can create visual connections between different datasets spread across their network, creating deep insights that enable users to gain a full understanding of their data. This engine is easily scaled up to allow a large number of users to benefit from the deep insights that it provides. Users can access Qlik Sense from anywhere in the world. Qlik Sense has an online portal that can be used consistently from anywhere at all. Having the ability to remotely analyze data gives users flexibility when it comes to choosing how to deploy their manpower.

    Jarno L., the managing director of B2IT, writes, “The associative technology features are the solution's most valuable aspects. Qlik was the first company to implement an in-memory associative analytics engine. This basically means that all data is loaded into memory, but it also means that instead of joining data together, the data is associated together. From the front end, from the user interface point of view, data can be joined or included or excluded on the fly. It can be drilled down and drilled through and users can slice and dice it and that type of thing can be done from anywhere in the data to any other place in the data. It doesn't have to be predefined. It doesn't have to have hierarchies or anything like that.”

    Tami S., the senior business intelligence analyst at the La Jolla Group, writes, “With the changing business landscape, it is nice to access Qlik Sense through an external website. As an organization when we use QlikView Desktop, we need to connect to our internal network. We can access QlikView through the QlikView access point but the website has a little different look and feel than the desktop application. We appreciate that Qlik Sense is browser-based and the user experience is the same whether at home, in the office or on a boat. As long as the user has internet access, performance is the same.”

    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. 

    Sample Customers
    Abbvie, Airbus, Barclays, BT Openreach, BMW, Daimler AG, HSBC, IKEA, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Mail Group, Sanofi, Siemens, Wendy'', Vodafone, Volvo
    SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Retailer10%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization49%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Computer Software Company6%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company18%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company9%
    Insurance Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business10%
    Midsize Enterprise54%
    Large Enterprise37%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise71%
    Buyer's Guide
    Qlik Sense vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform
    January 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Qlik Sense vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Qlik Sense is ranked 2nd in Data Visualization with 112 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews. Qlik Sense is rated 8.6, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Qlik Sense writes "Customizable with good ROI and a quick learning curve". 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". Qlik Sense is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, Apache Superset and Databricks, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Tableau. See our Qlik Sense vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.

    We monitor all Data Visualization 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.