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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
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.2%, down from 3.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform2.2%
Knowage0.9%
Other96.9%
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.
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

"Being able to schedule necessary jobs needed for production jobs and programming run times"
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"In terms of ROI, much better than any other solution when it offer full fledged features in open source, planned to have direct contact with SpagoBI for better support."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"I can't name the features the way the Knowage community calls them because I still don't know the lingo. However, I can describe them. I like the ability to join more than one report, set all fields on one end, and replicate that on the other reports. I like that a lot. I think it's one of the features that got me using Knowage. They have tables, and I like that too. They took SQL scripts and many other scripts and enabled them to even correlate with Python. That's also one of the best things about Knowage. You could also decide to get information per user role, and this is also a feature that I like in Knowage."
"It improves sales and products, which motivates employees."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its stability and user-friendliness, making it easy to manage."
"We have used all the business objects tools, but this one satisfies all of the business requirements in an optimized way."
"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."
"It is stable and robust."
"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."
"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe. Maybe a business person could liberate the existing universe and create a report on top of it, as well. So that's one cool feature."
"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."
"Web Intelligence has allowed our company to move to a self-service delivery model by allowing our internal clients to access, run and schedule reports dynamically without intervention of the BI team."
 

Cons

"Development of SpagoBI has now been moved to Knowage. Users interested in further developments of the platform will have to look there."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"We had stability issues."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The dashboard components could be better."
"The dashboard components could be better. They could do a lot more."
"It needs some improvement in its performance. I don't think it can handle huge amounts of data well when compared to other ETL tools."
"I am not so satisfied with the technical support because I am opening cases but it's taking too much time."
"We need to speed up the performance of our tool because it is slower compared to the SAP Analytics Cloud tool."
"The basic components of the solution could be improved."
"Fairly straightforward but, not as easy as the vendor made it sound."
"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."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use."
 

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."
"Its price is fair."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"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."
"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."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"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.​"
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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
19%
University
9%
Marketing Services Firm
9%
Retailer
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
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 Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise68
 

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

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.
886,664 professionals have used our research since 2012.