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

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs TIBCO Spotfire comparison

Sponsored
 

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)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TIBCO Spotfire
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
16th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.8%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 4.3%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO Spotfire is 1.1%, down from 1.2% 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
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.
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.
Rajesh Nai - PeerSpot reviewer
A robust BI tool, with good dashboard features and adverse event tracking
We would like to see some improvement in the default properties of the solution, so that there is less need for us to spend our time coding. We would also appreciate proper API and a proper training solution to be developed for this product so that we can quickly implement changes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."
"This solution allows you to input a wide range of file formats."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Dashboarding, reporting, and ad hoc reporting are the valuable features of IBM Cognos."
"It is a stable product."
"Integration with Office can enable the 'download' mode of storytelling.​"
"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."
"It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"The solution can scale."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer. We can develop the presentation layer with drag-and-drop capabilities. For end-users and for our interns in the company can create reports and do their data analysis processes or works by using the objects that we created on the presentation layer by themselves."
"It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly-complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"One of the main features is integrated statistical analysis."
"It's scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the map visuals that help us connect to the geo-specialized data which is more advanced than other solutions."
"From a scalability standpoint, I would say it's pretty fantastic."
"This solution allows us to integrate data from across all client departments, for effective reporting via a single dashboard."
"Data discovery is very simple."
"The most valuable features of TIBCO Spotfire are visualization. It's very nice, clear, and, flexible. You can analyze many data types and the user interface is very good."
"We used it pretty heavily in gathering data, which goes to our VPs. They are able to base their next revenue planning based on this metric. So, it has been invaluable."
 

Cons

"One thing that we really want is the ability to have data portrayed on an image. Cognos is not able to do it at the moment, and that's becoming a requirement from the business side: having an image and then plotting your dataset on top of the image as a map."
"Data modeling needs to be improved. We use the ETL process, and when we get errors, we then need to identify which structural change is required. The error messaging should be better. They should be descriptive rather than semantic."
"I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named PowerPlay. They have basically removed PowerPlay from it, which is something that I fail to understand because it was the most wonderful tool for business intelligence that I've ever used. As far as I know, they don't provide this functionality anymore, so this is one thing that I dislike about Cognos."
"There are a lot of limitations with the out-of-the-box tool."
"Chart quality: many other competitors have charts and graphics that look much better and that provide dynamic effects. Cognos doesn't."
"The high cost of a license makes it hard to scale up on a budget."
"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."
"The technical support team’s response time is slow and needs to be improved."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"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."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."
"The data compression has room for improvement."
"We would like to see some improvement in the default properties of the solution, so that there is less need for us to spend our time coding."
"One aspect where Spotfire could improve is its global recognition, especially in terms of support."
"The layered features within Spotfire can make it a bit complicated sometimes as compared to Power BI."
"The solution might be generic."
"The way TIBCO Spotfire is designed, in my opinion, is the reason why it lags a bit, especially compared to other BI tools like Qlik."
"The initial setup of TIBCO Spotfire is in the middle range of difficulty. The initial setup of Power BI is easier."
"We would like an easier way to get the product to the cloud. Right now, we have the on-premise version, and we would like to find a way to make it easier to migrate it over to the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cognos is super expensive compared to Tableau ($70/month) and Power BI ($20/month) — I think Cognos is roughly $200 a month."
"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
"The pricing and licensing policies are comparatively cheaper than other products in the market ."
"There is need to assess the purchase license accordingly so as to avoid audit penalties."
"The solution is affordable."
"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."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"It is averagely priced."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"Its price is fair."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"It is not cost-effective. It is 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.​"
"The ROI is nearly impossible to calculate."
"The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year."
"The price-point for this solution is negotiable depending on usage levels."
"The pricing seems competitive and reasonable. The value delivered by the product far exceeds the cost."
"This product carries a monthly licensing charge, with the amount depending on the features that are to be included. This costs also covers the use of technical support."
"The Tibco sales teams have been very difficult to work with - ignoring requests, misrepresenting level of demand, etc."
"In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable."
"The solution is affordable one."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
55%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
4%
Government
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Energy/Utilities Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
 

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...
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 do you like most about TIBCO Spotfire?
TIBCO Spotfire is easy to use. We initiated Spotfire as POC, with support from a tech team based in South Africa. Whi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TIBCO Spotfire?
Spotfire is a bit costly in terms of money, but it is value for money if you are installing it and working with it. C...
What needs improvement with TIBCO Spotfire?
The hierarchies or the maps to some extent may need some modifications. The layered features within Spotfire can make...
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
Spotfire
 

Learn More

 

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.
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Allergan, ASSS de Montreal, Avantium, Blue River, Bank of Montreal, Citibank, FrieslandCampina, Hellmann Logistics, Merck, Novartis
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. TIBCO Spotfire and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.