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QlikView vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform 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

QlikView
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (5th), Embedded BI (4th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. QlikView is designed for Reporting and holds a mindshare of 3.3%, up 3.2% compared to last year.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 4.0% mindshare, down 5.5% since last year.
Reporting
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Arjun Meda - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful for data visualization and business intelligence
Many of the features in Qlik Sense need to be available and reintroduced in QlikView. I believe many of the features have been added to QlikView after the layout containers were introduced. QlikView used to be a way more customizable tool than Qlik Sense is in the present time. Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times. Hiding off the apps in the app overview tab based on the access was a really good feature that needs to be introduced back in the product since I see that, at the moment, there are multiple groups on the tool, owing to which multiple changes on the QMC part is required to handle the solution. Only the person with access to the dashboard in QlikView could have a link to the dashboard through QlikView's hub or access points. With Qlik Sense, one can see whatever is available in the stream. If a user wants to control everything in the product, then there is no need to make multiple changes in the QMC at the individual app level. The aforementioned area can be considered to improve Qlik Sense.
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 product’s most valuable feature is its ability to view the entire data available for analysis."
"You can switch views easily."
"Easy to analyze data by click-through."
"The in-memory feature gives us better insight. It's also easy to drill down into the information and select information."
"It is useful to use a tool like this to have a view of data at a point in time. You can extract and create little data sets that you can store, and then over time, you can have a view for tracking changes. Especially when you work with a relational database or a database that's a production database, the data is dynamic, but if you use QlikView, you can take a snapshot of different datasets. In your own time, you can then get insights and report, build, analyze, and draw whatever you need from the data, which is quite useful."
"It's pretty easy to deploy."
"The most valuable aspect is its extensive library on Microsoft, providing a robust framework for implementation."
"One of the good thing is that you can integrate different data source technologies. So you can model your environment without having any of our views running."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"Way of creating reports."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
 

Cons

"The pricing is high."
"Better source data connectors."
"The solution is quite costly."
"Improvements are required in the hide and unhide functionality that falls under the layout container feature that has been used in my company in recent times."
"I would want them to have more options as a user. It would be nice for them to create their own dashboards and add fields."
"There is a lack of static PDF report generation and automatic resizing of the dashboard to fit the device."
"QlikView certainly lacks in its ability to share visualizations or create visualizations easily."
"QlikView lacks self-service capabilities, which means users depend on the IT team to make changes."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing is a bit too high and I think licenses should be unlimited."
"It has an annual license. It is expensive as compared to other competitive tools that do more for less. In South African rands, we pay about 100,000 to 200,000 a year."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one being low price and ten being high price, I rate pricing a four."
"QlikView is a reasonably priced solution."
"Qlik is fairly high in terms of pricing."
"The setup costs for QlikView are fair as are the yearly maintenance fees. The licensing becomes a bit more expensive and requires some planning for onboarding."
"It's reasonably priced and falls on the more affordable side."
"The platform's pricing is considered quite expensive, particularly given the dollar-based pricing."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
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 QlikView?
If you correctly use the product for your use cases, it provides value for money.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for QlikView?
Qlik Sense's licensing metrics are flexible. They provide packages based on needs, like named licenses, developer licenses, or shared pool licenses. There is also a core-based license option for or...
What needs improvement with QlikView?
QlikView lacks self-service capabilities, which means users depend on the IT team to make changes. Qlik Sense offers a more modern approach with self-service features, allowing users to build dashb...
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

No data available
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Canon, Gatorade, Amcor, Panasonic, Fila, Cambridge University Hospitals, Global Retail Bank, North Yorkshire Police department, Lanoo Group Publishers, and AonGroep Nederland.
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about QlikView vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.