We performed a comparison between SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."
"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."
"First of all, visualization tools, productivity, and predictive forecasting are mature."
"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."
"The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries."
"I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool."
"It is solid and stable."
"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
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"This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."
"The ability of filtering and segmentation of the data makes it very flexible compared to other tools."
"Its dashboarding is the most valuable. It is easy to create visualizations and dashboards and import Excel sheets and ESP files in Tableau as compared to other tools."
"The dashboards are amazing, with different report types and stunning visuals. Most importantly, Tableau's AI with machine learning automatically predicts features and reports based on historical data. These are the three most valuable features for me."
"The solution deployment was straightforward."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"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."
"It is very easy to implement and to use."
"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."
"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an outdated solution that is missing many features."
"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."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
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"I have noticed that Tableau is not very compatible with ClickHouse. There's no direct connection to ClickHouse; you have to set up an ODBC connection."
"I would like the solution to have certain features allowing the delivery of reports to the email."
"At the organizational level, increasing the servers' capabilities to support us as an enterprise tool."
"What is happening, with so many tools coming up in the market, is that people have to continuously get educated in order to use some of the more advanced features."
"If you wanted to create something without making it an extra column in the data set, you can't just rename it to a more user-friendly short name."
"Implementation requires a technical background."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"It needs more ETL capabilities, to be able to address the end-to-end BI need."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 103 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 reviews. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Oracle Analytics Cloud, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Databricks. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau report.
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Basically and besides for some differences between tools, Business Objects has "direct access" to data allocated on SAP DBs, since SAP storage has its own data structure and even its own indexes and the DBMS are used just as a repository or mapping tool. This means that access to SAP data is not a trivial task.
I don't remember at this moment if Tableau has interface modules with SAP but anyways my advice is: If you are using SAP ERP and technology then you have a big budget for your project and therefore just use the "native" tools that will let you access to SAP easily. If you are playing as a BI Consultant and needs to access SAP at a lower cost try Arcplan instead that have direct SAP connectors. Otherwise if you just need data mining on a regular DW or a set of application tables you should use Tableau, Qlikview or Arcplan -my favorites.
Regards,
Marcelo
Tableau and Business Objects come from two different (although overlapping) segments of the BI space. BO is an enterprise BI platform and Tableau is a data discovery tool.
Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer comparable to a BO Universe, this is both a strength and a weakness. The user connects directly to the data sources and is exposed to the schemas in their native form. The advantage is that the user can be completely self-sufficient, all they need from IT is data access. And they don’t need to know much about the data before they can start exploring it. Tableau is also very good at data visualization.
We use both Microstrategy and Tableau, the former is comparable to BO. We have a number users who use both tools.
Tableau is a data exploration and visualization tool with an in memory
feature. There is no middle layer like BO (universe). BO is an enterprise
product and so many tools falls under the umbrella. Xcelcius can be
equivalent to Tableau ....
In Tableau you create your own data sources with the help of odbc. Just
like Crystal Reports. The advantage being that Tableau compresses and stores its data internally in a compressed format and through the In memory feature its quite faster.
You can create your own hierarchies on the fly, can do any amount of
analysis on data visualization, drilling is very easy and it's very user
friendly.
As it's a visualization and exploration solution ... You can't have basic styles like
section breaks of BO.
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.