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Knowage vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 15, 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

Knowage
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
33rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (23rd)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.6%, 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 Intelligence2.6%
Knowage1.0%
Other96.4%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

BS
Software Engineer at syntegra
Open-source with great embedding capabilities but the dashboards could be better
I know the initial setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take a long time to deploy. Even on your own personal computer, when you want to try it out, it doesn't take too long to get it running. For the initial setup, I'd say it's maybe a four out of five in terms of how easy it is. You need to add these Java dependencies and so forth, which can be a bit boring, however, it's almost perfect. To deploy Knowage usually takes about a day. In terms of the implementation strategy, it's just following the instructions that they give us on the installation and then just knowing how to handle the process. Usually, there is a group of engineers who do that for us and manage the server itself. If a team is knowledgeable, then it doesn't take a long time. When you need a new instance, it's very quick. The implementation strategy is based on just following instructions on the installation process from Knowage. For deployment and maintenance, we need just maybe two people simply to monitor the traffic coming in. However, it's maintained by people who were doing other jobs like maintaining our other server. They just monitor the Knowage server and make sure that it's up and running and that there are no bugs. There are not too many bugs coming out from the debugger.
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

"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The embedding feature is great."
"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"It's a great product. It has a lot more features than many other BI tools. You can get the most out of machine learning, the best connectivity to Python, and it cuts across enterprise sections."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"It allows hundreds of end-users to be able to access business reports and make business decisions based upon them."
"The stability is pretty good, there are no bugs or glitches, it doesn't crash or freeze, and the performance is good."
"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."
"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."
"The development using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is very good."
"There are many tools that help the organization like SAP Lumira, SAP Business Explorer, SAP Design Studio and Dashboard to give you the summary and detailed analysis."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
 

Cons

"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward. I've also seen inconsistencies between versions. For example, under the tools, especially in the cockpit, the way you create reports is now different. You will also find some configurations within a particular state, like a line chart, which differs from version to version. I think consistency is an essential feature in a product, especially for business intelligence products."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward."
"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"I faced difficulties when using the email feature and documentation was scant."
"The support is very meager: We had to break our heads to figure out everything"
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"The solution could be less expensive. It's a bit pricey now."
"The integration could be improved. The SAP suite has some integration problems and it has some huge development needs. For example, when you use Power BI, if you publish a dataset to the web, there is no issue in seeing the data with the report. The data and report are integrated automatically. Or when you use QlikView, when you publish the QVD file, the report is integrated with QVD. Also, with Tableau, when you publish the data, it's in the hyper database, in the memory, and the dashboard with data is integrated seamlessly. In the SAP side, it's not easy. There are lots of business layers. There are also some performance issues in the SAP BusinessObjects suite. They should focus on the technologies. We are partners and every step of the way, SAP asks us for money. If you want to see the products, the PDFs, if you want to learn the product, online training, etc., everything has a cost on the SAP site. Because of this, partners try to get to know the products on their own. SAP only focuses on the sales side—only money is important for SAP, not the quality. In that way, the operation is not easy on the SAP side. As a suggestion, they should focus on customers first instead of money."
"Fairly straightforward but, not as easy as the vendor made it sound."
"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."
"If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it."
"SAP does force users to manage it a certain way, specifically around queries, and does not integrate well with other platforms, or lacks a certain level of flexibility."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"The product's pricing falls on the spectrum's cheaper side, excluding its licensing cost. The product's pricing is good compared to other tools in the market. My company makes payments towards the licensing costs of the product on a yearly basis."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"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."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"Its price is fair."
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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
Construction Company
18%
University
11%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
 

Questions from the Community

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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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FIAT Group, Italian air navigation service provider, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Telecom Italia, ASL Genovese, San Giovanni Battista University Hospital
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
896,467 professionals have used our research since 2012.