Looker vs Microsoft Power BI vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

The compared Google and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Google is ranked #10 in EBT , and holds a 6.4% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.1, and holds a 9.3% mindshare. Additionally, 80% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Looker

Read 20 Looker reviews

2,532 Views
1,013 Comparison Views

80% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 329 Microsoft Power BI reviews

24,257 Views
15,524 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Read 112 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform reviews

5,471 Views
4,267 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Looker

Microsoft Power BI

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Looker, Microsoft Power BI, and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI.

To learn more, read our detailed Embedded BI Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Embedded BI

March 2026

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Helped 885,667 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Looker	6.4%
Tableau Enterprise	17.6%
Qlik Sense	8.6%
Other	67.4%

Embedded BI

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	80.3%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform	2.3%
Microsoft Power BI	9.3%
Tableau Enterprise	6.7%
Other	81.7%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Hemanthreddy Vakiti

Data Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Automated dashboards have transformed daily trend analysis and now drive faster business decisions

One of the best features that Looker offers is LookML, which allows us to develop dashboards directly rather than dragging and dropping. We can also customize some fields that are not available in the table by combining different tables using LookML. Compared to other reporting tools, Looker is somewhat more customizable and interactive. With the help of Views and Explore in Looker, we can combine different tables and create a unique column that is not available in the table, and then use that column in our reporting dashboard. Since we brought Looker into our project, it has improved data visibility and enabled faster interaction between us and our client. Rather than simply using free form or Essbase, seeing customizable and visualized data in Looker allows the business users to understand the trends in the data more easily rather than just seeing numbers. It has helped us save a lot of time. The automated dashboards that we develop allow us to run the dashboard for the coming years with only some modifications, which has reduced some manpower and working hours. When I joined this project, there were around eight to nine people for developing Looker dashboards. Once the development part is completed for almost all cases, the next part is just monitoring the dashboards and making some minor changes required to align with business goals. After development, the team was reduced to three or four people, so the manpower has significantly reduced, and time taken has decreased as well. For a business user to understand data from free form or Essbase, it usually takes thirty minutes to an hour to go through the previous day's trend. However, with the visualization tools in Looker, they can easily understand the data and compare it to the previous one or two years using a bar graph, pie chart, or other graphs. The return on investment has been very good. The number of employees has reduced to half, and time is saved by nearly two to three hours a day because of automated reports. We are just monitoring the reports to ensure they are released. This has saved nearly two hours per day, and the team has been reduced to half.

Read full review

Antonio Flor

Lead Anaplanner at Chaucer Group

Data integration has improved reserving and expense control while collaboration drives fast dashboards

Regarding drawbacks or weak points in Microsoft Power BI, it may not be directly related to the tool itself, but with our architecture, as we couldn't get a service account, which is an email address that has no relationship with the employees, just to establish the connection with Anaplan. We couldn't get it to work on SSO, so we use an employee account which could be a point of weakness, meaning if the person leaves, that connection will break. If the person goes on holiday and we need to refresh, we have to change the connection as well, but we have to live with that since we're not using SSO on the service account. Regarding the natural language processing feature, we're trying to avoid using it too much because it can slow down the connection, so as much as possible, we try to build the logic and any transformation in Anaplan, and then deliver an end product to Microsoft Power BI.

Read full review

EmmanuelOladinrin

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions."

"In the past, adding a new dashboard to our product was a multi-week development effort, now our nontechnical product management and client success teams can create, launch, and maintain high quality dashboards with no interruption to the development team."

"Empowering every employee to make smarter decisions in less time easily pushes us into the black on ROI."

"With respect to buy solutions, cost is relevant. However, the Looker solution would have outmatched the ongoing multi-million budget spending with respect to cost-efficiency."

"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."

"It is easier and quicker to find things in the database."

"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."

"The most valuable features are the ability to create visualizations for non-technical employees, as well as the ability to provide ways to dynamically slice the data."

More Looker pros

"This is a solution that I would recommend because it is easy to use and they will be able to streamline their business processes."

"When we are introducing Microsoft BI to our clients, if they're familiar with Excel, the transition phase will be much easier for them. They can easily switch from Microsoft Excel to Microsoft BI. The core foundation or the base technology is the same in both tools. There are a few limitations in Microsoft Excel, and this is where Microsoft BI comes in."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the graphic representation."

"One of the key factors why I use Power BI is because it's very flexible with other Microsoft tools."

"There is continual improvement year-over-year."

"It's similar to Excel, but it's much more powerful than Excel."

"It's a great tool for visualization data, and it's free for engineers."

"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data; at least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets, so having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

"Ease of report development is a key feature."

"Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, these reports are generated and automatically sent to them according to a schedule."

"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions. If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships."

"It is more user-friendly and easier to work with the report creation part, creating reports out of an established universe."

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer."

"It is the best product for business analysis and help to grow the business."

"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."

"First of all, visualization tools, productivity, and predictive forecasting are mature."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pros

Cons

"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel."

"Some of the visualizations are a bit limited on how much you can customize them."

"There have a been a few minor bugs, including a security bug that did not affect us."

"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."

"This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult."

"Looker depends on the database components. For example, if you have a underperforming database, then you likely will have a poor performance experience."

"The visualization capability of the product is limited."

"It needs to be more user-friendly."

More Looker cons

"If you are having millions of rows of data or you have a large database, Microsoft BI's performance depends upon how powerful your hardware is. When I am handling large amounts of data I do not use Microsoft BI or Tableau because of this, I use D3."

"Creating dashboards could be easier."

"It was easy to implement Microsoft Power BI into our existing infrastructure, but integrating it with Oracle Cloud was very difficult. The integration with Oracle Cloud required us to build a sophisticated database replication process because the APIs for Oracle Cloud are very restricted in terms of volume, depth, and complexity of queries. However, the part of implementing Power BI into our infrastructure was very easy. It required almost no tech input because it was all part of Office 365. To overcome the integration issues, we developed an extract and update process, although it was quite complicated and involved a lot of IP. Power BI excels in integrations and its ability to handle various data sources. It would be beneficial if it could integrate more seamlessly with cloud interfaces like Oracle Cloud, although I understand the challenges with Oracle's policies on database access. Another area for improvement would be enhancing error messaging, especially when working with Dataverse and M Code for automation."

"When you have to scale up, you must pay double because you can't just scale up 10 or 15%; you need to double your extra storage, so it's really bad."

"The smart phone application could be improved, along with better graphics and faster updating."

"This solution is resource-heavy."

"The UI looks awkward once the graphs have been generated in the console. They should make the graphs more user-friendly, because other parts of Microsoft Power BI are user-friendly, but the graphical representations aren't."

"Maybe they can enhance the UI a bit. Right now, it's very basic, I would say, compared to the MicroStrategy or Qlik."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

"We have encountered so many issues when the architecture and design was fragile."

"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."

"Previously there was the Discussion board function, but it was not good and no one used it."

"There is still a lot to be done on the mobile side to make Web Intelligence truly seamless between the desktop and mobile versions and I would like to see SAP pay a lot more attention to this."

"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 platform should be a bit more user-friendly."

"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."

"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is cheap."

"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."

"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."

"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."

"Microsoft BI is free for the personal edition, but there is also a paid-for professional version."

"The pricing for the solution is relatively higher compared to other alternatives."

"Paid for itself in the first month."

"It is reasonably priced."

"Microsoft BI for desktop is free to use, and you can download and use it."

"It is free."

"Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

"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."

"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."

"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 cost-effective. It is expensive."

"It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."

"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."

"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."

"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."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Retailer

Computer Software Company

Media Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	166

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	32
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	66

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 wou...

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Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize info...

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How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are ...

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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 be...

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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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What needs improvement with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform can be improved by developing another module of SAP BusinessObject...

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Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Looker

Compared 12% of the time

MicroStrategy vs Looker

Compared 8% of the time

Databricks vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

ThoughtSpot vs Looker

Compared 7% of the time

Sisense vs Looker

Compared 4% of the time

More Looker Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 14% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

QlikView vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

IBM Cognos vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 33% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Cognos vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 4% of the time

Anaconda Business vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

Compared 2% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Looker

March 2026

Download Looker product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

March 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform

March 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform report

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform product report

Also Known As

No data available

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects

Overview

Looker is a powerful data analytics platform that empowers businesses to explore and analyze their data in real time.

With its intuitive interface and robust features, Looker enables users to easily create and share interactive dashboards, reports, and visualizations.

The product's advanced data modeling capabilities and seamless integration with popular data sources make it a top choice for organizations looking to gain valuable insights from their data.

Google

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.

The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features

Central management: Access all your BI from a single, central launchpad that can be customized to meet user-specific needs. The launchpad provides business users with access to all their BI tools, reports, notifications, and applications in a single place. This includes the ability to launch SAP Analytics Cloud.
Data visualization and analytics: Create powerful visualizations, dashboards, and applications to assess risk, improve efficiency, identify opportunities, and enable users to analyze developments and data. Business insights can be shared with colleagues across enterprises.
Integration with Microsoft Office: Integrate with SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA to power real-time analytics. For large-scale data analysis, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel to discover in-depth business insights and forecasts. Data analytics information can also be embedded into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
Cloud support: Extend and expand your BI on the cloud. SAP Analytics Cloud connects your BI to the cloud and offers enterprise planning and advanced analytics from a single online solution.

Reviews from Real Users

SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.

A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."

An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."

A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. It has great visualization.

SAP

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: March 2026.

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