Domo vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

Domo 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 Domo is 8.1%, up from 4.5% 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.

Robust, powerful, and easy to use

James John Wilson

Business Development Manager at Freelancer

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.

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

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The most valuable features of IBM Cognos are governance and enterprise reporting."

"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."

"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."

"One of the strong suits of Cognos is its robust corporate reporting capability."

"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."

"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."

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

More IBM Cognos pros

"This solution allows us to change our performance metrics and tracks our goals in real-time."

"I mostly see it as an ETL which has many system connectors. It does a good job of ETL."

"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."

"Using the "cards" which function as preconfigured reports or views. I use many of them simultaneously on an organized page, with filters that allow me to see high-level information as well as subsets across the dataset, in a few clicks. Many Excel-challenged users love to use this product for its simplicity."

"It has the best GUI. And it already has an ETL tool embedded in it..."

"All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo."

"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..."

"What makes me really fond of Domo is the ETL because it enables us to maximize a single platform for pulling reports and automating things. We can send the raw data from a third-party platform and do the rest of the ETL in Domo, including transforming data, adding columns, etc."

More Domo pros

"We find the product to be very stable."

"It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities."

"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."

"It is solid and stable."

"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."

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

"It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."

"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."

Cons

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

"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."

"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."

"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."

"The AI-based features could be further enhanced by the solution."

"It would be better if it is was easier to implement without extensive training for it."

"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."

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."

More IBM Cognos cons

"I would like to be able to drill down more when there is a particular area where there is a problem. I don't clearly see that in Domo at the moment."

"There were very few cases on some of the tables, the data tables, where I wish there was an additional feature or two."

"It's too early for me to say that something needs improvement, but there are times when there have been some flexibility issues with Domo... Tableau has a window function which can be integrated into a calculated field. That is missing in Domo so you have to make changes to the data set using ETL or SQL."

"There's a learning curve before you can get used to the solution."

"When you're exporting a graph out of Domo — suppose it is in the form of a donut chart or it is in form of a stack — the data comes out in tabular format, not as a graph. When exporting the data, I would like them to create a tab for graphs and another tab with the data in tabular format."

"Domo or any other BI tool has room for improvement, in particular, in the calculations. User-guided material isn't available for calculations. The tool, though user-friendly, could also be more customizable, especially when you're building a dashboard. Data integration could also be improved in Domo because even if the tool connects to multiple data sources, some hiccups still arise and need to be addressed."

"The forecasting feature, the regression features, and the Python libraries could all be improved. They're all in beta."

"In Tableau, you can create virtually any kind of visualization. Based on your creativity, you can create a visualization on a human body structure, you can create a visualization on anything that you want. But Domo is limited to a few kinds of visualization views: standard things like bar, pie, and some other charts... I would like to see them add new views for presenting the data in the visualization space."

More Domo cons

"Most of the Apps right now are into dashboarding. This tool, for the Crystal Reports in the phase I'm primarily working on, does not have those dashboarding capabilities, like in the other advanced tools like Power BI or ClickView, and compared to them the dashboard generation is not that great."

"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."

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

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

"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."

"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective. It should also be improved in terms of end-user experience. It requires further improvements for usability and ease of use. It should have more dashboarding metrics and much faster integration with ERP so that when you double click, you can instantly see the scenario-based result."

"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"It is averagely priced."

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."

"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."

"The solution is affordable."

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

"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"The pricing differs from customer to customer, depending on the package."

"Domo has more than one licensing model. You can choose between the yearly subscription and the per-user licensing model. The tool is flexible in terms of licensing. As for the cost, Domo is an end-to-end BI tool so its pricing is a little higher than other players in the market, for example, non end-to-end BI tools such as OBIEE and Tableau specific only for business intelligence and presenting data to the end users, unlike Domo which handles everything. You want to get Domo as an integration tool, an ETL tool, etc. As the tool is end-to-end, its cost is always going to be a little higher than other BI tools, but it's worth paying because you won't have to spend extra for other activities. After all, Domo can do those activities."

"The solution is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"No matter if you're a developer or an end-user, the licensing cost is around $12 per user per month."

"For about 100 users our cost is $95,800."

"I think it is reasonable."

"I'm not sure about pricing, but I believe Domo is quite costly. Prior to joining this organization, I had a Domo license with my former employer and I think that license was around $500 to $600 annually. That was for a single license. I think it varies, depending on the organization that is acquiring Domo."

"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."

More Domo pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."

"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."

"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."

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

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pricing and cost advice

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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

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Retailer

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 Domo?

All our client SLAs and daily and weekly dashboards are tracked on Domo.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Domo?

Domo can be crazy expensive. They have a lot of capabilities but depending on the pricing model you have, either the...

What needs improvement with Domo?

If Domo had a Copilot feature, you could interact with the graphs and talk to the graphs and tables.

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

Tableau vs Domo

Compared 47% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Domo

Compared 39% of the time

Databricks vs Domo

Compared 3% of the time

Looker vs Domo

Compared 3% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs Domo

Compared 2% of the time

More Domo 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 Domo product report

Domo

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

corda

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects

Learn More

IBM

Domo

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.”

Domo is a cloud-based, mobile-first BI platform that helps companies drive more value from their data by helping organizations better integrate, interpret and use data to drive timely decision making and action across the business. The Domo platform enhances existing data warehouse and BI tools and allows users to build custom apps, automate data pipelines, and make data science accessible for anyone through automated insights that can be shared with internal or external stakeholders.

Find more information on The Business Cloud Here.

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.

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.