Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Pentaho Business Analytics 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

Pentaho Business Analytics
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Operations Analytics (4th), Reporting (16th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
104
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 Pentaho Business Analytics is 0.5%, down from 0.6% 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

Sayan König - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, easy to understand, and simple to set up
The repository should be improved. There should be the possibility to have versioning, to make it combinable with some Git repositories or something like that, to check out the processes and make sure it has a traceable history. The solution could really be improved. There are too many bugs in our version.
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

"The interface of Pentaho Business Analytics is easy to use and does not require high-level skills to operate the tool."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"It is robust, offers market intelligence, and utilizes modules effectively."
"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."
"Easy to use components to create the job."
"We were able to install it without any assistance from tech support."
"The most valuable feature of Pentaho is the Tableau report."
"I use the BI Server, CDE Dashboards, Saiku, and Kettle, because these tools are very good and highly experienced."
"The solution is stable."
"​Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.​"
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"Way of creating reports."
"​The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use."
"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."
"The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports."
 

Cons

"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."
"Pentaho Business Analytics is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical skills."
"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."
"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 tool is very good, and yet it has some problems as it relies heavily on Java."
"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."
"It is not simple to use."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an outdated solution that is missing many features."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Pentaho is expensive ."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its price is fair."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
14%
Educational Organization
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
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

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView ( /products/qlikview-reviews ) and Tableau ( /products/tableau-reviews ). I usually use the community edition.
What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?
Pentaho Business Analytics ( /categories/bi-business-intelligence-tools ) is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical ...
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.
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 customers to carefully assess the value they expect to derive from the implementat...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.