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Pentaho Business Analytics vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
134
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (4th)
Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Operations Analytics (4th), Reporting (15th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

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 Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.6%, down from 0.6% 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 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jul 27, 2022
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.
Sayan König - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2022
Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up
It's a data warehouse for finance and central bank reporting purposes, and an ETL tool in this environment It's easily understandable. The product is quick and flexible, with very good steps to make data transformation possible.  The initial setup is pretty straightforward. The repository should…
MukeshMathur - PeerSpot reviewer
May 3, 2024
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

"We are able to generate quality reports easily which allows us to decrease response time."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"IBM Cognos offers tools so that you can design and develop your own test queries and reporting solutions."
"The correlation analysis is excellent. It's one of the best that I have used to date."
"I have worked on the features like dashboards and stories, and I do like them a lot."
"Even while a user is using a cube for reporting, there will not be a situation as ' Cube file locked; unable to build or deploy'."
"The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools."
"We use IBM Cognos for enterprise analytics and reporting."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' best features include the ease of developing data flows and the wide range of options to connect to databases, including those on the cloud."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"The solution can scale."
"Has features that can be leveraged to scale out and scale up."
"It is solid and stable."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"The Dynamic HTML (DHTML) client option of Webi has been enhanced adding features that were previously only available with the Java client including conditional formatting and support of XLS as a data provider."
 

Cons

"Cognos is quite slow - it's missing the performance of the PowerPlay cubes."
"The visualization aspect needs to be improved and I believe, this is being resolved in upcoming versions."
"IBM Support can be slow at times, but they can usually deliver in a timely manner."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We need more predictive analytical functions, not only diagnostic or decryptic analytics."
"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."
"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."
"Pentaho Business Analytics' user interface is outdated."
"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."
"Another concern is that Pentaho is not customizable or interactive."
"Version control would be a good addition."
"Logging capability is needed."
"We did not achieve the ROI. The work delivered to users had lesser value than the subscription cost."
"The repository should be improved."
"Pentaho, at the general level, should greatly improve the easy construction of its dashboards and easy integration of information from different sources without technical user intervention."
"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."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"The biggest area for improvement would be the dashboarding capabilities due to the recent change from Xcelsius to Dashboard Designer. This has created a gigantic ripple in many companies because the skill sets required are drastically different."
"​This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"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."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"It is quite pricy. I think Microsoft BI is cheaper. Tableau might also be cheaper, but it also depends on the usage. If you have very many users, Cognos can be a problem. It could be cheaper than Tableau but not for so many users. If you have a few thousand users, Tableau, which is generally quite expensive, can be cheaper than Cognos."
"Pricing should be improved."
"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."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"Free and commercial versions are available."
"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."
"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."
"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 is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 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.​"
"Its price is fair."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
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Comparison Review

it_user6978 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 10, 2013
Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition
Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
57%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
The organization has both options based on their needs and budget constraints. The Enterprise Edition is expensive wi...
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
The product to me is not as user-friendly as other players in the market. It also still needs improvement in the repo...
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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?
The licensing cost for SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform can be significant due to its complexity. It is crucial for cu...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

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.
Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentaho Business Analytics vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.