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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

"Provides ability for business users to directly manage their plans, data, and budgets."
"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."
"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."
"It has helped us to automate a lot of our processes."
"We have gone from an organization that looked backwards at financials and had a one-time annual budget to an organization that looks forward, has rolling forecasts, long-term planning, metrics, and push button reporting."
"More accurate, reliable, and timely forecasting."
"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."
"Adaptive saves us huge hours in budgeting, for each roll-up it saves us two hours at least, and we usually have more than 20 roll-ups."
"One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."
"This reporting and broadcasting solution has a lot of flexibilities and can connect to multiple source systems."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use."
"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."
"Tableau offers excellent visualization and fast data discovery with quick turnaround time."
"What I find most valuable is that you can run the reports anytime and you can receive the report at a scheduled time."
"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 setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
 

Cons

"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."
"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."
"We do have issues getting information on our customer success turnover."
"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."
"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."
"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."
"It's a Workday product; they could do a little bit better to integrate a pure-play integration with Workday, which really doesn't do that."
"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"ROI for the reporting product alone, as a component in a whole stack of things contributing to ROI, is in my view a minor contributor."
"The amount of resources used has caused the system to fail from time to time."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
"There are a lot of limitation in SAP BW especially for scheduling, which can limit the full utilization of BOBJ, but there is a solution for it all if you think out of the box."
"We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's affordable."
"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."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"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."
"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"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.​"
"Its price is fair."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"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 an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"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."
"SAP is losing market to its competitors because of its costly user license and licensing model. They can do much better on the licensing side. That's what Microsoft has been doing, and that's why Power BI is gaining market share at the moment. SAP needs to relax a little bit on the licensing part. If Microsoft is giving people a solution that is half of the cost of SAP, people will definitely go with Power BI."
"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."
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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
12%
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.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.