Amazon QuickSight vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

Amazon QuickSight vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon QuickSight is 8.1%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 4.3%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

Helpful for visualization purposes but delayed drill-downs feature

Anoop Jose

Senior Manager - Architecture and engineering excellence at a healthcare company with 201-500 employees

Compared to Power BI, I felt QuickSight lacks some features, like delayed drill-downs. Drill-downs were the main area where we found QuickSight lacking. Especially for root cause analysis, the ability to drill down from a high-level problem to its root is crucial. Aside from that, QuickSight is a good service.

Visualization is better than other tools, offers good dashboard and analytics features but it is not easy to adapt to the product

MukeshMathur

Business Analytics Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

As per my opinion, because SAP is a very worldwide product or very useful product, I'm not talking about improvement, because I just think that SAP can focus on the pricing factor. The cost of this product, so every company is not suitable to use it. Because of the very huge amount of integrations, every organization can not use it. So, it is a very costly product. Secondly, from an educational point of view, So, it is not easy to adapt to each and every IT person because some, most, in India, most cities, such as Delhi, Bangalore, or Chennai, only metro support the educational platform for that. So, just my suggestion is SAP should focus on every user; it should be easy to pick the product and, easy to carry, easy to use in every life. So, SAP must try to improve in this part.

More Amazon QuickSight pros

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The tool can join data from different sources, write back to databases, generate alerts, and be customized to our preferences. It's an enterprise BI tool that's more powerful than just visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau."

"The most valuable features are Report Development (Functionality) and Information Distribution (Flexibility)."

"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."

"Mapbox integration for geospatial analytics down to longitude/latitude layers."

"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."

"In terms of stability, I think that Cognos is more stable than Tableau and Power Bi because of its framework manager concept that allows us to import metadata and store it in the framework manager."

"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."

"The initial setup is quite straightforward."

More IBM Cognos pros

"It is notably fast in handling large data set refreshes, making it efficient for data analysis."

"The solution's most valuable feature is its flexibility to visualize certain logs."

"The product is easy to learn."

"The solution is very quick to turn around and integrate."

"The solution is simple to implement."

"The best part about Amazon QuickSight is the filtration capability."

"A valuable feature of Amazon QuickSight is that it's a cloud-native service provided by AWS. As all platforms within my company run on AWS, that's the leverage of Amazon QuickSight. Amazon QuickSight is also easy to use, and I find the native connectors from AWS valuable as well."

"It helped the managers to visualize the data activities."

"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."

"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."

"First of all, visualization tools, productivity, and predictive forecasting are mature."

"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."

"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."

"The solution can scale."

"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."

"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."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pros

Cons

"The solution seems to slow down the servers."

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

"Extending features on dashboards so it becomes a real dashboard building application, not only a data exploration tool."

"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."

"I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older versions like IBM Cognos 10 or 8. Additionally, the Event Studio, which offered great flexibility in previous versions, is no longer available in IBM Cognos Analytics 12. These are areas that could be improved to enhance the product."

"It could have more options for themes."

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."

"Extending dynamic cubes aggregate awareness with calculated measures."

More IBM Cognos cons

"One area where Amazon QuickSight could improve is its formatting features for dashboards."

"It is a simple tool with limited features. Its visualization set is very limited, and it also has limited functionality. An intelligence tool should not be only for creating reports. Currently, we have to do all computational and mathematical operations outside. We should be able to do such operations in an intelligence tool like this. As an intelligence tool, it should support dynamic refresh. QuickSight currently supports the refresh at a minimum of one hour, and it is not suitable for dynamic dashboards that require frequent refreshes."

"There could be an end-to-end pipeline for data cleaning as well as presenting it using different visualizations."

"Amazon QuickSight's visualization could be improved."

"The solution must be more user-friendly."

"It can be made more user-friendly as some users might find this solution hard to implement. Qlik Sense, for example, is very user-friendly."

"They could provide more options for graphics and other features."

"Lacked connectivity with other third-party tools and data sources."

More Amazon QuickSight cons

"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."

"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."

"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."

"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."

"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."

"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."

"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."

"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"IBM Cognos is priced reasonable. However, it is more expensive than Power BI and Tableau."

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."

"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."

"It is averagely priced."

"IBM Cognos price is on the higher side of the spectrum. However, with the features that it brings, such as correlation analysis, it's worth the money. They should look at the pricing more clearly because it's a little on the higher side."

"Pricing should be improved."

"It is pretty expensive."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"Amazon QuickSight you subscribe and you use the service."

"The standard edition is free to use for exploration purposes while the enterprise edition needs to be paid for. The pricing for this solution is very reasonable."

"The Amazon QuickSight licensing model my company's on is pay-as-you-go, but I wouldn't be able to give the figures because that's handled by the finance department."

"It's affordable compared to other long-term contractor business tools available in the market."

"The pricing is cost-effective with a good plan."

"The solution is not affordable."

"I wouldn't say that it is an expensive product, but to stay competitive they would need to bring down the prices."

"The product pricing is better than other vendors."

More Amazon QuickSight pricing and cost advice

"We are satisfied with the solution, but we are not satisfied with the licensing cost which SAP offers. They offer one lumpsum licensing which does everything. That is not the right strategy, because sometimes you don't have power users, they are only viewers, but we need to buy the full license for them. This is not something we want to continue with."

"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."

"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."

"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."

"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."

"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."

"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."

"SAP is losing market to its competitors because of its costly user license and licensing model. They can do much better on the licensing side. That's what Microsoft has been doing, and that's why Power BI is gaining market share at the moment. SAP needs to relax a little bit on the licensing part. If Microsoft is giving people a solution that is half of the cost of SAP, people will definitely go with Power BI."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pricing and cost advice

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824,129 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6663

BI Expert at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

May 25, 2013

SAP Business Objects vs. Microsoft BI

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…

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

55%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...

What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

What do you like most about Amazon QuickSight?

The integration is very seamless. We stored our result CSV files in S3 and connected directly from there.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon QuickSight?

QuickSight is considered cost-effective. As far as I know, QuickSight is cheaper compared to other solutions like Pow...

What needs improvement with Amazon QuickSight?

QuickSight needs to add more visuals similar to what Power BI offers. I have noticed that many drill-down visuals and...

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I wou...

Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?

Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...

What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making ...

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Comparisons

Compared 14% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Qlik Sense vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 25% of the time

Tableau vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 20% of the time

Looker Studio vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 11% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 8% of the time

Metabase vs Amazon QuickSight

Compared 1% of the time

More Amazon QuickSight Competitors

SAP Analytics Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 27% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 15% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Essbase vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 7% of the time

Tableau vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Competitors

Product Reports

IBM Cognos

Download IBM Cognos product report

Amazon QuickSight

Download Amazon QuickSight product report

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform product report

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

QuickSight

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects

Learn More

IBM

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SAP

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

Amazon QuickSight is a fast, cloud-powered business analytics service that makes it easy to build visualizations, perform ad-hoc analysis, and quickly get business insights from your data. Using our cloud-based service you can easily connect to your data, perform advanced analysis, and create stunning visualizations and rich dashboards that can be accessed from any browser or mobile device.

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

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

MLB Advanced Media, Infor, HotelBeds, Gemini, Jivochat, Edmunds.com

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.

Amazon QuickSight vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform