Board vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

Board vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Board is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 4.5%, down from 5.7% 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.

Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.

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 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pros

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is a stable product."

"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."

"Security administration tools are powerful and flexible."

"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."

"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling."

"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."

"The basic platform comes with several meta-modelling tools."

"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."

More IBM Cognos pros

"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."

"We have better reporting and have been able to better track performance."

"All the reports are prepared automatically."

"It is very easy to use. It has got what they call a toolkit, which is a no-code development environment. You can develop a whole solution with it because it is a complete platform. There is a lot of online material that can be used as a reference. You can help yourself while developing a solution. There are some prebuilt applications in the platform environment. You can very easily customize and integrate these applications. It also has flexible scaling of machine resources, which is really great."

"The benefits are getting the data in one spot, the ability to report dynamically, and version control."

"It is useful for self-analysis regarding company data and helps to find areas where we can improve."

"It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well."

"Now, we have only one version of the truth."

More Board pros

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

"This reporting and broadcasting solution has a lot of flexibilities and can connect to multiple source systems."

"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."

"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."

"Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports."

"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 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."

"We find that we can scale it as needed."

Cons

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

"I would like to see the introduction of mapbooks for supporting some geographical information."

"The tool needs to improve the connectivity since I see that, at times, there is a need to increase the memory in the database."

"We would like to see development of the product's UI function, to make it more of a UI tool that can be configured as required."

"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."

"The data uploads that we do, such as Excel files, have a lot of restrictions. If we can make it a bit more user-friendly, allowing us to have more flexibility it would be a great help."

"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."

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

More IBM Cognos cons

"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. "

"The product can be improved by making it possible to know where cubes are used."

"We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout in terms of stability."

"It would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website."

"It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use."

"We would like to see better logging in the procedural world."

"If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets, I would like that going forward."

"We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."

More Board cons

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

"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."

"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 is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."

"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."

"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."

"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."

"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."

"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."

"The solution is affordable."

"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."

"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."

"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."

"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."

"I rate the product price as four or five on a scale from one to ten, where one is a low price, and ten is a high price."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"Its price is fair."

"It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."

"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."

"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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Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

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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

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Wholesaler/Distributor

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...

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?

We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS ge...

What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

What needs improvement with Board?

Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would ...

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 13% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs IBM Cognos

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 29% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 12% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Board

Compared 8% of the time

More Board 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

Looker vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 6% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Download IBM Cognos product report

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download Board product report

Board

November 2024

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

October 2024

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

No data available

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects

Learn More

IBM

Board International

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.”

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

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.

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

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