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Metabase vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 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

Metabase
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
25th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Metabase is 0.8%, down from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.7%, 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 Intelligence2.7%
Metabase0.8%
Other96.5%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Ibrahim Izz El-Deen - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Engineer at USYTech
Modern analytics tool enhances user interactions with neat visualizations for improved decision-making
One area for improvement could be in offering more advanced features even in the open-source edition or making the paid versions more cost-effective. Data scalability, especially if the data grows, requires manual infrastructure management, which could be improved. Increased customization and visualization options in the open-source edition would be beneficial. Additionally, it might be helpful if more complex queries and stored procedures were supported.
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

"Metabase's key advantage is its modern approach to business intelligence."
"I rate the solution’s stability a nine out of ten."
"It is easy for a new user to learn the tool."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used to query data into Metabase. I think it is very useful and handy for a novice."
"The solution is stable."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"​Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.​"
"Crystal Report and the enterprise reporting is very good, it's very detailed."
"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. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves. It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable."
"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. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently."
"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
"Good, powerful functions in the table format report compared with Microsoft Power BI."
 

Cons

"I think there is a need to add a few more advanced visuals in the tool. There are a standard set of visuals in the tool which are available."
"The solution could provide more customization."
"One area for improvement could be in offering more advanced features even in the open-source edition or making the paid versions more cost-effective."
"The tool must be made more user-friendly."
"There are a lot of stability related issues with all SAP BI products, especially compared with similar Oracle, Cognos or QlickView tools."
"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."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau."
"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."
"It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration."
"Because of their licensing model, they are losing the market."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"Customer Service: In a word, bad."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say it is a cheap tool, but it's viable."
"Using the open-source edition of Metabase on AWS EC2 cost us around $29 per month for the EC2 instance, which was affordable."
"The product is open-sourced."
"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."
"SAP is losing market to its competitors because of its costly user license and licensing model. They can do much better on the licensing side. That's what Microsoft has been doing, and that's why Power BI is gaining market share at the moment. SAP needs to relax a little bit on the licensing part. If Microsoft is giving people a solution that is half of the cost of SAP, people will definitely go with Power BI."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"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."
"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.​"
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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
Comms Service Provider
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Metabase?
Using the open-source edition of Metabase on AWS EC2 cost us around $29 per month for the EC2 instance, which was affordable.
What needs improvement with Metabase?
One area for improvement could be in offering more advanced features even in the open-source edition or making the paid versions more cost-effective. Data scalability, especially if the data grows,...
What is your primary use case for Metabase?
I used Metabase for business intelligence and analytics in my organization. We connected Metabase to AWS Athena, allowing us to query and visualize data stored in S3 buckets.
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

No data available
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Metabase vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.