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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs ibi WebFOCUS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

ibi WebFOCUS
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Predictive Analytics (8th), Embedded BI (10th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
104
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. ibi WebFOCUS is designed for Predictive Analytics and holds a mindshare of 1.5%, up 1.3% compared to last year.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 3.7% mindshare, down 5.3% since last year.
Predictive Analytics
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Q&A Highlights

Ariel Lindenfeld - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 28, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

Twanette Jurd - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence, reporting, data integration, ETL, data migration - everything is handled within one unified platform and highly scalable solution.
WebFOCUS goes beyond just dashboards. It's also used for operational reporting, making it crucial for mission-critical systems. In fact, a core strength is that it's not "just" a BI tool; it can be used to build complete applications. It is the best tool because of its all-in-one nature. Data integration, ETL, data migration, everything is handled within the same platform. Then, on the front end, it offers portals, reporting, distributed analysis, and more. For customers who have data in the right structure and right format, the WebFOCUS Designer tool is very powerful. It allows them to create self-service reporting applications.
MukeshMathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Visualization is better than other tools, offers good dashboard and analytics features but it is not easy to adapt to the product
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It's highly scalable and can handle significant data volumes."
"The most valuable feature is building ad hoc reports."
"It stands out for its ability to work across different platforms, support mainframe data, offer cloud integration, automate report scheduling, and provide a robust scripting language."
"The solution can read and write 500 different types of outputs."
"I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution."
"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."
"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."
"Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, reports are generated and automatically sent according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"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."
 

Cons

"The challenge lies not in what the tool can do but in how you use it and understand the data."
"If there were to be any improvements right now, their documentation needs to get in sync with their product."
"The solution can be improved by adding more automated options for reporting."
"When it comes to customer support, we don't always reach the right person. Sometimes, we get junior-level reps who aren't as knowledgeable as we are."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"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."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
"The UI could be updated a bit."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, with ten being expensive."
"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."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"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."
"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 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
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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…
 

Answers from the Community

Ariel Lindenfeld - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 25, 2014
Mar 25, 2014
I don't want to interfere in a community discussion, but I need to note that the information posted by Nurul Haszeli isn't good to work from. The Microstrategy brief is old and contains statements that were badly inaccurate even when it was created. The Summary of New Features document is for WebFOCUS 5.2, while the latest release is WebFOCUS 8. The technologyevaluation.com link is from 2000. W...
2 out of 6 answers
it_user6534 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 23, 2014
I could answer the Business Objects questions ... Webfocus is not my expertise.
it_user78798 - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 23, 2014
I can provide some feedback on WebFOCUS, and have SOME experience in BO. What questions can I answer for you?
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Information Builders WebFOCUS?
I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, with ten being expensive.
What is your primary use case for Information Builders WebFOCUS?
I use it for supplying and developing business intelligence (BI) solutions, data management and reporting applications, and for the development of complete web-based applications. It's a versatile ...
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

WebFOCUS
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ace Hardware, AutoZone, Fred Hutch, MasterCard, OFS Brands, PostFinance, Real D, Yellow Pages, ABC Financial, AcuSport, BBVA, Babcock
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. ibi WebFOCUS and other solutions. Updated: January 2023.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.