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AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3) vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

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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

AtScale Adaptive Analytics ...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
45th
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (7th), Data Governance (44th), BI on Hadoop (1st)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3) is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.7%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence2.7%
AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3)0.5%
Other96.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

it_user822762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI and Reporting Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The GUI interface is nice and easy to use, but the organization of the icons is not saved across users
Connecting to a Hadoop database to create a cube to connect to Tableau. We want to be able to easily create cubes which can be connected to Tableau for visualization The product had many issues. We had great collaboration with the product development team, but the product was not able to meet our…
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 GUI interface is nice and easy to use."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"The most valuable function of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is the universe, so customers can build their own reports without programming skills."
"We want to use HANA and something called SLT, which will cover our replication and allows us to do modeling directly in the cloud, which is a great feature."
"It's provided us with best practice reports out of the box for various modules, as well as an interface for creating adhoc reports with more analytical capabilities."
"The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful. The drill-down features are very good because, in other solutions, such as Excel, you have to create separate pivot tables and a lot of other operations to do drill-downs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform tool does the drill-downs automatically. Overall the solution is user-friendly and has a lot of drag and drop features."
"I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"This solution provides much greater and faster access to information for a wide mixture of users and supports and promotes a common view of information across the organisation."
 

Cons

"There was an issue with the incremental aggregation not working as indicated."
"The product was not able to meet our 10 second refresh requirements."
"The organization of the icons is not saved across users."
"The stability is again dependent on your sizing activity. If you don't have enough hardware and use it a lot, the tool will crash."
"The basic components of the solution could be improved."
"It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud."
"The platform is totally separated; SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is not easy to integrate with third parties or inside the SAP environment."
"On the downside, we have had some challenges with upgrades."
"Previously there was the Discussion board function, but it was not good and no one used it."
"We have encountered so many issues when the architecture and design was fragile."
"We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"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 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."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"Its price is fair."
"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.​"
"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
Healthcare Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
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

AtScale, AtScale Intelligence Platform
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rakuten, TD Bank, Aetna, Glaxo-Smith Kline, Biogen, Toyota, Tyson
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: August 2026.
911,473 professionals have used our research since 2012.