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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Tableau 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

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tableau
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
296
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 3.7%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 17.5%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Q&A Highlights

it_user112062 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 11, 2014
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ROMIL SHAH - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time
When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers. Tableau has recently launched a paid version for the documentation. So, documentation has become a little bit challenging when it comes to Tableau development because we do not have any tool to export the data out of it. It is a license-based feature that you need to purchase to prepare documentation. So, on the documentation front, for preparing clear documentation for any dashboard, it would help if we get an embedded option, rather than buying a license for each user for the documentation. To document anything, if I have to connect to each workbook and see what has been written as a formula and then document in the Word document, it is pretty time-consuming. We have the Microsoft stack, and we are currently evaluating Power BI because Tableau has a limitation of 50 columns for a drill-down report. If we want more than 50 columns, we have found a hack, but there is no ready-made option for doing it. So, we have to use another tool in case we need a drilled report with more than 50 columns. There are many instances where users need 80 or 90 columns for their analysis, and switching between two technologies becomes a challenge. It is not a cost-effective approach for us. Their support should be improved. We are not happy with their support. Whenever we raised queries, we were pointed to a few blogs, and we didn't get a proper solution from them. Their licensing should also be improved. They want us to purchase a Tableau Creator license for business users, whereas Power BI Desktop is free for business users. They should come up with a basic license with one or two connectors that our business users can use for preparing their visualizations. Tableau also charges us per user for users who want the data only through email.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature."
"​The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
"I have seen improvement in our work after using the solution."
"The solution is stable."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"It provides supporting data for critical policy and operational changes"
"The product has the best features for analytical views and filters."
"It gives us a new dimension to the way that we analyse our data."
"Tableau is highly scalable. Now that they've introduced Hyper, you can create an extract of more than 5 million rows in minutes and then do your analysis."
"The initial setup is simple."
"The maps and colors and interface are all fantastic."
"I like the visualization component."
"I consider Tableau to be the best analytical tool available. It's really handy to use and can be used by non-technical people."
 

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."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"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."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"The ability to use it on MAC machines. As far as I know, this is not possible."
"I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it."
"The tool's OpenAI integration was announced last year. However, it is late. Tableau is a good solution for end customers. However, there are some concerns regarding the stability and performance of its server architecture, including SaaS services. The server side appears unstable, and performance issues are noticeable, often accompanied by unclear error messages."
"An advanced type of visualization is a bit tricky to create. It has something called a Calculated field, and that sometimes gets a bit difficult to use when you want to create an advanced type of visualization."
"From a downside perspective, some of the more advanced modeling techniques are actually fairly difficult to do. In addition, I just fundamentally disagree with the way you have to implement them because you can get incorrect answers in some cases."
"The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly."
"Tableau is difficult to scale because of the cost, which makes it difficult to scale."
"If they could add global filters in the stories, more chart types, and default colours, it would help."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"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."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"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 professional version of Tableau is quite expensive."
"If they want to be competitive in the market, the price must be improved."
"Tableau can be costly (but this can be indefinable, such as user experience vs. cheaper etc.)"
"The solution's licensing is based on user-basis. It depends on the business ROI it offers. It's not on the higher side or too cheap; it falls in the medium-cost range. The price is determined by user usage, so the cost will also increase as the number of users increases."
"Tableau's prices are relatively high for our market. I am from Serbia, so many companies in this market don't have the ability to pay for expensive software. My clients are quite satisfied with a lot of Tableau's qualities except for the prices."
"In Korea, the tool's pricing depends on the scale of usage. For instance, it's reasonable for a department with fewer than 50 users to adopt Tableau, like sales. However, the pricing becomes an issue when considering an enterprise solution for a larger user base, say 10,000 people."
"ROI is very high, but it requires a data preparation/blending tool."
"There is a license for this solution and we pay on an annual basis."
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Comparison Review

it_user6330 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 2, 2013
MicroStrategy vs. Tableau
After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…
 

Answers from the Community

it_user112062 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 11, 2014
Jun 11, 2014
Sorry, I do not know Tableau, I know BO just for upgrading old reports. I use Qlikview.
2 out of 9 answers
it_user116763 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 9, 2014
Hi, We would recommend QlikView (QV) to your Client, not Tableau or SAP Business Objects. QV have much more advanced opportunities which Tableau is just working on now: for example mobile versions of this application. SAP Business Objects takes longer time to create reports (hours), when QV does it in minutes or seconds. You can read more about them from Gartner 2013 BI Magic Quadrant. Regards, Angelika Galayko Specjalista ds. Sprzedaży [QlikView Solution Provider Icon] mobile: 666 063 268 e-mail: angelika.galayko@bpx.pl www.bpx.pl [stopka bpx] Business Partners eXcellence Pl. Powstańców Śląskich 28/30 53-333 Wrocław [http://www.bpx.pl/images/face.png][http://www.bpx.pl/images/link.png] Adres do korespondencji Ul. Równoległa 2 02-235 Warszawa Spółka wpisana do KRS dla Wrocławia-Fabrycznej pod numerem 0000262389. Kapitał zakładowy 78 400 PLN wpłacony w całości. NIP 894-287-81-84. REGON 020355704
it_user116742 - PeerSpot reviewer
Jun 9, 2014
Beginning with version 7.0.4, Tableau supports connecting directly SAP® Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) using the Tableau SAP BW connector. The Tableau SAP BW connector uses the OLE DB for OLAP provider and issues live queries to SAP BW using the MDX query language. One benefit to this type of connection is that you will always connect to the latest data. Additionally, the connection experience is very similar to using Tableau with other OLAP data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase. Beginning with Tableau 8.1 the Tableau SAP BW connector also supports data connections using extracts. For more information about using SAP BW extracts, see SAP BW Extract limitations.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Educational Organization
44%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

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...
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.
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 Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...
What do you like most about Tableau?
Tableau is a fantastic tool that provides impressive dashboards and customized reports.
 

Also Known As

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
845,564 professionals have used our research since 2012.