We performed a comparison between Information Builders WebFOCUS and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Predictive Analytics solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It stands out for its ability to work across different platforms, support mainframe data, offer cloud integration, automate report scheduling, and provide a robust scripting language."
"The solution can read and write 500 different types of outputs."
"The most valuable feature is building ad hoc reports."
"I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. It's highly scalable and can handle significant data volumes."
"It allows the analysis of business data and enables decisions based on the analysis."
"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."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"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."
"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports."
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"The challenge lies not in what the tool can do but in how you use it and understand the data."
"If there were to be any improvements right now, their documentation needs to get in sync with their product."
"When it comes to customer support, we don't always reach the right person. Sometimes, we get junior-level reps who aren't as knowledgeable as we are."
"The solution can be improved by adding more automated options for reporting."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"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."
"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."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
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More Information Builders WebFOCUS Pricing and Cost Advice →
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Information Builders WebFOCUS is ranked 6th in Predictive Analytics with 18 reviews while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews. Information Builders WebFOCUS is rated 8.8, while SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Information Builders WebFOCUS writes "A flexible mainframe product with unique file features and a rock solid scheduling feature". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". Information Builders WebFOCUS is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Alteryx, Databricks and TIBCO Spotfire, whereas SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and MicroStrategy. See our Information Builders WebFOCUS vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report.
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I have not used BusinessObjects since the acquisition by SAP, but had experience using Crystal Reports and been\seen many SAP presentations regarding BusinessObjects.
Big positive and negative for WebFOCUS is that everything is programmable, we used it in a procedural language type of way and everything can be a variable which is nice when you need to program a complex solution. Can be a real headache when you need to debug/troubleshoot/maintain.
The FocalPoint community for WebFOCUS is very strong and probably IMHO one of the greatest strengths for WebFOCUS.
Weaknesses, the toolset has not kept up with other IDEs in regards to change management, version control and DEBUGGING - most times at our company, you are better off programming in Notepad and keeping copies of the file and "print out" a debug statement.
That's from experience. From a tool vs. tool perspective, I'd say they are very close.
What might put you in favor of one over the other will be BusinessObjects. If you have an SAP ERP - likely you have a jumpstart with pre-delivered content that you can build upon or enhance.
From WebFOCUS - customization and freedom in development (programming flexibility, D3, jquery integration)
I have to apologize as I don't have experience using WebFocus.
However, I did find a few articles that you might find interesting (related to WebFocus):
1. www2.microstrategy.com
2. ikax.net
3. www.technologyevaluation.com
4. www.webfocusexpress.com
5. www.ncat.edu
Yes, I can help you. Feel free to send me a message.
I can provide some feedback on WebFOCUS, and have SOME experience in BO. What questions can I answer for you?
I could answer the Business Objects questions ... Webfocus is not my expertise.