ELK Kibana vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

Elastic and SAP are both solutions in the Data Visualization category. Additionally, 60% of Elastic users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.

ELK Kibana

Read 4 ELK Kibana reviews

60% willing to recommend

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Read 114 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence reviews

10,876 Views
3,480 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

ELK Kibana

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and ELK Kibana are competing products in the data analysis and visualization category. SAP BusinessObjects showcases strength in support and pricing satisfaction, while ELK Kibana excels in advanced analytics features and overall value.

Features: SAP BusinessObjects provides comprehensive analytical capabilities, real-time data access, and a focus on deep business intelligence, making it ideal for detailed reporting. Conversely, ELK Kibana excels in log and time series analysis, offering powerful visualization, extensive customization, and strength in handling diverse data streams.

Room for Improvement: SAP BusinessObjects could enhance flexibility, scalability, and support for community-driven solutions. Meanwhile, ELK Kibana may improve on structured deployment, enterprise-level customer support, and capabilities for in-depth business intelligence reporting.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP BusinessObjects demands a structured deployment process with robust integration and solid customer service. ELK Kibana offers a flexible, scalable deployment highlighted by community support and accessible documentation, making it favored for those prioritizing speed.

Pricing and ROI: SAP BusinessObjects involves higher initial costs but offers significant long-term ROI through extensive BI capabilities and precise analysis. ELK Kibana presents a cost-effective setup with lower upfront expenses and scalable pricing, catering to organizations seeking efficient solutions without sacrificing functionality.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Visualization Report (Updated: May 2026).

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Data Visualization

May 2026

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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

ELK Kibana

Average Rating

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

114

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th), Data Visualization (4th)

Featured Reviews

KentJones

Engineer at Raytheon Technologies

Visualization tools are optimized providing us with increased flexibility

One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well. I think the types of visualizations are nice, but I think there's room to add more without having to go to third party plugins to do that. Just comparing the total number of visualizations that it provides compared to Grafana, you can see that it's lacking. The UI experience isn't as rich as it is with Grafana or certain other tools. I would like to see better authentication options, typical authentication options, like active directory and LDAP as well, just a richer UI with more graph type options.

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TarunKumar7

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The automatic update of the graphs from a dashboard is very convenient."

"The user interface is very good, and the data visualization is simple and user-friendly."

"Some visualization tools are optimized for time series like Kibana, which allows you to do both, and we like the flexibility of being able to analyze different types of data."

"The stability of this solution is fantastic, as it has not failed us for months and we use it extensively."

"The optimization and flexibility of visualization tools."

"Having a tool where you can find logs that were generated months ago, and being able to search over a long period of time, is great."

"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."

"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."

"It integrates well with BW and HANA, which demonstrates strong data integration capabilities."

"The common metadata environment means that the entire organisation has the same definition of core measures rather than these being derived in spreadsheets or specific reports."

"It is stable and robust. It has pretty direct integration with SAP ERP. It is easy to use."

"The Universe in BO ensures consistent coding for business rules etc."

"Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."

"The solution I built replaced a manual process that would take 3 weeks and provided an automated solution."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pros

Cons

"Security could be improved thereby avoiding the necessity of a third party plugin."

"Populating data sometimes is also difficult for the user."

"One area that could be improved is security. Being an open source product, if you want to add security, if you want to add authentication, you've got to use a third party plugin that may or may not cost you, or alternatively upgrade to their subscription service, which is a downside as well."

"Having a kind of wizard that would help you when you are typing your search would make it easier and quicker to refine your search, and ultimately find what you are looking for."

"This solution should allow the user to combine two indices into one graph and it should provide a unique count."

"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."

"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau."

"SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality."

"The amount of resources used has caused the system to fail from time to time."

"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."

"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."

"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective. It should also be improved in terms of end-user experience. It requires further improvements for usability and ease of use. It should have more dashboarding metrics and much faster integration with ERP so that when you double click, you can instantly see the scenario-based result."

"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."

"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6663

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Financial Services Firm

12%

Construction Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	67

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...

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

SAP BTP is an expensive solution.

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Comparisons

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Compared 25% of the time

Qlik Sense vs ELK Kibana

Compared 17% of the time

GoodData vs ELK Kibana

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Analytics Cloud vs ELK Kibana

Compared 12% of the time

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SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 6% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Cognos vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors

Product Reports

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Data Visualization

May 2026

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Buyer's Guide

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

May 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence report

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

Overview

Kibana lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack, so you can do anything from learning why you're getting paged at 2:00 a.m. to understanding the impact rain might have on your quarterly numbers.

Elastic

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform offers powerful tools for enterprise reporting and data visualization, enhancing strategic decision-making through robust integration and secure analytics capabilities.

Designed for comprehensive enterprise reporting, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform integrates seamlessly with SAP ERP, supporting organizations in creating detailed financial, operational, and academic reports. The platform allows data manipulation across multiple sources using a semantic layer and provides intuitive tools like Web Intelligence and Lumira for user-driven report creation. It features centralized management, versatile connectors, and supports large-scale data analytics critical for business forecasting.

What are the key features of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

Integration Capabilities: Seamless connection with SAP ERP and various data sources.
Dynamic Scheduling: Automate report generation for timely insights.
Robust Security: Protects data with stringent security measures.
Semantic Layer: Simplifies data manipulation across sources.
Intuitive Tools: Facilitates user-driven report creation with Web Intelligence and Lumira.

What benefits should be considered in reviews?

Comprehensive Reporting: Enables detailed and accurate enterprise reports.
Decision-Making Support: Enhances strategic decisions with reliable data.
Scalability: Efficiently manages large-scale and complex data analytics.
Versatility in Analysis: Offers flexibility for ad hoc analysis and KPI monitoring.

Organizations across sectors like healthcare, education, insurance, and retail leverage SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for its capability in facilitating detailed reports and integrating dashboards for key performance indicators. Its extensive reporting features support in-depth analytics vital for business prediction and decision-making processes.

SAP

Sample Customers

Sprint, Grab, Volkswagen, Autopilot, Voyages-SNCF.com, Just Eat, Accenture, Dell, Verizon Wireless, Kaidee, Green Man Gaming, Compare Group, Tango, Quizlet

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, Apache and others in Data Visualization. Updated: May 2026.

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