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Adaptive Insights vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Adaptive Insights
Ranking in Data Visualization
21st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Business Performance Management (10th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (4th), Reporting (24th), ESG Reporting Software (13th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in Data Visualization
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 3.5%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence3.5%
Adaptive Insights1.7%
Other94.8%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight
Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models
For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.
TarunKumar7 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech
Data insights have driven faster financial forecasts and improved role-based decision making
The best features SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform offers include cross-enterprise sharing, where sharing insights is easier and seamless across my organization, and creating role-based dashboards. The role-based dashboards help my team and organization by providing information to specific users, allowing them to make decisions more easily, anytime, anywhere, across any device. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to perform financial reporting to make decisions faster. Since we started using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, we have been able to make faster, data-driven business decisions based on actual data insights and data analysis, which has accelerated our ability to make better decisions for our business productivity.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."
"The reporting tools are what I gain the most benefit from."
"It's very stable."
"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."
"Reduced planning and budgeting time - it takes hardly a couple of days to complete my entire budgeting exercise, uploading actual data and generating monthly reports with comparison of actual versus budgets in no time."
"Automated reporting."
"Provides ability for business users to directly manage their plans, data, and budgets."
"This solution transformed the way both of my companies did reporting."
"All these things have benefit the main stakeholders to check and observe the trends and take the decision for the betterment of the company."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its stability and user-friendliness, making it easy to manage."
"Web Intelligence has allowed our company to move to a self-service delivery model by allowing our internal clients to access, run and schedule reports dynamically without intervention of the BI team."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer."
 

Cons

"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."
"Pricing can be made better affordable to SMEs. Every year price increase is an issue."
"Needing to focus on upgrades for all industries, including CPG."
"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."
"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."
"The planning functionalities are the weakest part of Adaptive Insights."
"It's complex; thinking about the business models and capabilities in Adaptive."
"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
"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."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"On the downside, we have had some challenges with upgrades."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."
"It's affordable."
"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."
"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"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."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"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."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
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Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Adaptive Insights vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
904,680 professionals have used our research since 2012.