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Domo vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Domo
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Data Integration (46th), Business Performance Management (15th), Reporting (7th), Data Visualization (9th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Domo is 6.7%, up from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 3.7%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

James John Wilson - PeerSpot reviewer
Robust, powerful, and easy to use
There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two. However, they were particular. What I wanted to see was the ability to collapse when you group a set of rows, let's say when you group them by status or health, so you have your red projects grouped up top. I wanted to compress or collapse that group of red and then open the yellow projects and then the green projects. There were a bit more features in the tables than I wanted to see. They have a widget that you can use either in Microsoft PowerPoint to pull over data into your PowerPoints and refresh graphs or charts or metrics or tables. I would love to see that available in Google Slides. I used it successfully in PowerPoint; however, at one company, they were only using Google products, and so that widget didn't help with reporting in slides. Therefore, we had to do a bit more manual work for our quarterly business reviews or monthly business reviews to produce our executive presentations. Sometimes the fonts were difficult to read if you're trying to put a lot of data in a table and show a lot of rows. Sometimes the fonts got too light, and you had to really play with it to try and figure out how to make it readable. One thing I had to do, and I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, was when I was running a meeting, I would have to go turn off the data jobs. If I was running a meeting and a lot of times people were scrambling in the background to do their updates even as the meeting was occurring, it would cause the page to render very slowly. It would sometimes pause or freeze. I found that if I went and turned off the status, the data update jobs that we're pulling data from Smartsheet, then the meetings would work more smoothly, and there were no interruptions or delays.
Sumeet  Zalpuri - PeerSpot reviewer
Fully integrated enterprise-level tool
The initial setup was not straightforward. Since it is a complete enterprise tool, it needs a certain level of expertise to set up the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. There are a lot of steps involved. You need to get the user accepted and you need to validate the data. So you need to understand the architecture of the application. I would rate the initial setup as moderate since it's not very easy or much difficult. For a small enterprise, the installation would take one day. You must ensure you are on a supported platform like Windows or Linux and if your database is not on the server but in a different zone of the network, you need to ensure connectivity. You must also ensure the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform supports your organization's browser. These are the major things that must be taken care of before the installation. Around 500 users are using the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform in my company. We are a team of around eight technical people involved in the deployment and maintenance of the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. If you run a SAP shop with ECC, the best solution is the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform because it's tightly integrated. You'll get lots of offers from SAP when it comes to licensing. So there's an advantage. But if you are not a SAP shop, the licensing becomes a hindrance. So if you have SAP as a source, then I recommend people to go with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform as it's a tool that works wonders. I have been working on POCs where we use SAP data for BI, which was a nightmare. So if you have ECC and SAP in the back end, go with the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform. If you have any other tools in the back end, then try to negotiate and see the use case.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboarding itself was pretty easy. So both the front and the back end were positive in this case."
"The user interface is quite good."
"We find the ease of using the solution valuable."
"I mostly see it as an ETL which has many system connectors. It does a good job of ETL."
"In Workbench 5, they have come up with a very useful feature called Upsert. When you're pushing data into the data set, if the data is already available it will update the data, and if that the data is not there it will insert it. That is a beneficial feature that they introduced in the latest version."
"The most valuable feature currently is the self-service BI availability in Domo. I would say the data file fabric solutions where the users themselves are responsible for generating their own reports."
"We've worked with all the features of Domo. Among the most important are Pivot and Sumo Cards. We can use drill-down from the top-most level with a click, generating charts."
"This solution allows us to change our performance metrics and tracks our goals in real-time."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."
"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 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."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more flexibility in their pricing structure. The trend is moving from database pricing to a user-license pricing model. That would be a benefit if they wanted to reevaluate their pricing structure."
"In terms of the analytics, there is quite a limited set of options when using Domo. Whereas with Tableau we can perform heavy statistical computations, Domo doesn't have that capability. Domo is quite limited on that side."
"The preconfigured apps need to be more relevant to allow one, out of the box, to load data in order to use pre-set reports/views."
"I would like to publish a dashboard for the employees so that they can also see the performance of our organization. But that is not a feature in Domo, although it's something that Zoho provided."
"It is expensive."
"One of the biggest problems is that end users require a license to run their own reports and dashboards, which are fairly expensive."
"The forecasting feature, the regression features, and the Python libraries could all be improved. They're all in beta."
"One of the improvements that could be made is related to improved storage options."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"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."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I believe that the investment in Domo was worthwhile because it allowed for the organization to jump in quickly, with little training. There are different plans available based on the requirements."
"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"Because it's software as a service, it's more expensive on the face of it. But there are a lot of variables. I don't have to pay for servers or for infrastructure. I don't have to pay labor for my IT organization to set up or maintain the environment. I don't have to pay for them to upgrade the software, and test it, etc., because when it rolls out, it is transparent and seamless for us. But, because of that, it costs more, I imagine, than Sisense, or Yellowfin, or Power BI. A lot of those make it sound like they're inexpensive, but when you add in all the hidden costs and all of the overhead, it's probably comparable."
"Domo is slightly costly but it's much cheaper than some."
"They've built an "app economy." Some of them are really expensive, so they're not for startups and smaller companies. They're more like enterprise tools. We couldn't afford some of them, because they were so crazy expensive. But if I was working for a bank, insurance company, or some bigger corporation then, for sure, you could justify those prices... It was silly expensive back then and it probably still is, or even more expensive."
"We are making money from Domo, and all our clients are happy with the information that they receive from it."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"It started out at about $600 a seat. However, then as we started to grow, it scaled that down to about $330 or 3$50 a seat, if I'm not mistaken."
"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 is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 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."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
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Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Domo?
All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo.
What needs improvement with Domo?
One of the biggest problems is that end users require a license to run their own reports and dashboards, which are fairly expensive. Domo is also not the easiest product to use and is more expensiv...
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 would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
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 process.
 

Also Known As

corda
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Capco, SABMiller, Stance, eBay, Sage North America, Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana, Telus, The Cliffs, OGIO International Inc., and many more!
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Domo vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.