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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 ease of use, overall, is one of the valuable features, as is the ease of setup. Other than making sure IT was aware of, and agreed with our proceeding, we did not need IT for any of the setup. The ease of setup is more valuable than you might think. The ease of configuring the security policies, setting up groups, and setting up personalized data permissions so that only certain people can see certain data — that stuff is amazing... Domo really is extraordinarily full-featured, but it's really easy to use."
"The ability to create custom connectors was useful because you never know, with customers, what platform they want to utilize or what data they have. It gave us a lot of flexibility in being able to bring data in from different places."
"We find the ease of using the solution valuable."
"The fact that you can add any data source is valuable. The entire data handling suite they have, all the apps, etc., is pretty amazing. One of the key things, not being a techie or a data-warehouse guy, is that you can connect data sources, and do all kinds of pretty amazing things."
"The ETL tools they have in Redshift are pretty awesome... I can work in Redshift to get the data from AWS and work in Redshift, in Domo, to create Transforms and the data structure we need..."
"The user interface is quite good."
"It has the best GUI. And it already has an ETL tool embedded in it..."
"The best feature of Domo is that it's completely on the cloud. I also like that you can handle data end-to-end without having to depend on multiple tools. Another specific feature I like the most about Domo is Magic ETL because, through it, you can do all your expression, transformation, and loading activities very smoothly. The tool also follows the lineage concept, so you can understand what kind of transformations took place on a particular data set. You can find end-to-end data from the source until it has become the final output or the final data set. Whatever happened to a particular data set, you can understand it through the Domo lineage, and that isn't possible in most of the tools available in the market, but in Domo, that's available. The tool is also solid and because it's on the cloud, it uses multiple data engineering in the backend and multiple algorithms in the back, behind the scenes, resulting in a great performance. For example, if an end user such as the CEO or COO opens a report or the dashboard and it takes more than ten seconds, the end user won't be interested in looking at that report or dashboard, but Domo enables better performance and there's usually no performance issues from that tool."
"First of all, visualization tools, productivity, and predictive forecasting are mature."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
"​The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
"The solution is stable."
"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."
"I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more dashboard creation options."
"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."
"Their STK is not up to date and you can't access it on their website. They have a private STK to access resources in Domo."
"I would also like to see improvements to their drag and drop Magic ETL tool. You can drag and drop your ETL tool, but it doesn't really work for a large amount of data. It struggles with that. In a real-world application, where you're working with 30 million rows or 100 million rows, it takes a bit longer to process the data. If you do it in the Redshift ETL tool, using your own code, it's much faster."
"It's quite slow. We are using about 2,000,000 rows of data. Creating certain reports takes almost a couple of minutes, which should not be the case."
"Their organization or client service didn't always keep up... They took on more and more clients and the processes slowed down a little bit."
"It is expensive."
"One of the improvements that could be made is related to improved storage options."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."
"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
"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."
"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."
"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."
"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."
"The pricing differs from customer to customer, depending on the package."
"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."
"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."
"We are making money from Domo, and all our clients are happy with the information that they receive from it."
"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."
"I think it is reasonable."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"​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."
"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.​"
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"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."
"We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webby that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay."
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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.
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