No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Cognos Express [EOL] vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Cognos Express [EOL]
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)
 

Featured Reviews

it_user175122 - PeerSpot reviewer
Program Analyst at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees
Needs a little bit of tuning but once setup and tuned correctly it's very stable.​
Building complex custom reports Bursting to specified users Data Warehouse accessible to users to quickly build their own reports Dashboards on KPI, scoring vs targets. Nothing I can think of now. 2 years. No issues encountered. Needs a little bit of tuning, once setup and tuned correctly…
EO
Data Analytics Manager at Dangote Industries Limited
Solution empowers self-service reporting and delivers comprehensive performance insights
Empowering business users means they should be able to work independently without depending on the developer. One advantage of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is self-service capabilities, allowing users to do drag and drop to build their own reports and perform analyses without needing technical know-how.The platform has many drivers that I can use to connect to virtually all available databases, making it easy to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and many others. With the cloud version, I can fetch data on-premises and to the cloud for analysis easily. It is so flexible that I can make choices for fetching data. For authentication in an SAP environment, I can choose to integrate with SAP logon for SSO or use AD authentication for convenience, along with the flexible integration options.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Customer Service: Very good. Direct access to top qualified resources."
"Cogno’s number one advantage is security."
"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool, and these are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting apart from other solutions."
"The stability is pretty good, there are no bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and the performance is good."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform helps improve data governance and security measures because it is one application that integrates all departments of an organization."
"Semantic layer is their main heart of SAP Business Objects."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform outperforms all other tools such as Power BI and Tableau, showing more accuracy, reliability, and flexibility compared to all other BI tools worldwide."
"The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC."
"If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool."
 

Cons

"Building the cube can last a very long time, also during the cube-built very big temporary files are built, more than 4GB."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is scalable, but the scalability of the servers and other parts is complex. SAP has made scalability complex; it's not so easy, and it's not so quick, while in other solutions, we can increase the scalability of the servers very easily and very fast, e.g. in Microsoft, but in SAP, it's complex and it takes more time."
"We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward)."
"Fairly straightforward but, not as easy as the vendor made it sound."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive."
"​This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"The financial area in the solution has certain shortcomings that need improvement."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"​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."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"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 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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise66
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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

Cognos Express
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Gamma Powersports, Gasmart, University of Iceland, Monarch Industries, Mace, Quintiles, Argility, Talent2, Accelrys Inc., J. B. Poindexter and Co., FK Gardner and Sons Group
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: March 2026.
885,376 professionals have used our research since 2012.