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Oracle Analytics Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

Oracle Analytics Cloud
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (7th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
109
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Oracle Analytics Cloud is 2.5%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 3.7%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Enrique Pacheco Salinas - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced analytics facilitate strategy development but demand specialized expertise and better support
Oracle Analytics Cloud is not very user-friendly, however, it is robust and capable of performing a wide range of tasks. However, skilled personnel are needed to operate it effectively due to its complexity. In addition, the brand name carries significant value as many large companies and banks are familiar with Oracle.
Declan Dempsey - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides efficient data reporting while needing easier deployment and improved interface
Users tend to put everything into Excel, though I try to discourage this. The best feature about it for me, and for them, is the fact that you have a universe that is well made. This means you don't have those months that get assigned. You can just get to the point and get a report very quickly. Unfortunately, in some ways, it's a double-edged sword because it becomes more of a self-service ETL, even for the reporting team. If you have a decent universe and you just want to quickly get something together, it's very usable. Compared to Click, you can drop those reports very quickly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's robust. It has the ability to handle massive amounts. After reporting has been developed, there is an ease of use or a user-friendly interface for a trained workforce."
"The specific capability I find important in Oracle Analytics Cloud is that it allows the basic user to easily drag and drop data. I also like that the solution allows the user to decide what to measure and what to see in the reports."
"It plays a crucial role in facilitating decision-making for various organizational stakeholders."
"This is a stable and scalable solution."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"It's great for consolidation and creating one source of truth."
"The ability to quickly search for and access relevant data is crucial."
"The features that I find to be the most valuable are the BAS (Business Analytics), the Narrate feature, and the auto-visualization."
"​Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.​"
"Way of creating reports."
"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."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"I like the fact that we can integrate it seamlessly within our Epic environment, but probably the best thing that Crystal Reports offers is the ability to do visualizations. They're simple to do, and they're catchy. So, it is a really great tool."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, reports are generated and automatically sent according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month."
"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."
 

Cons

"The migration of older dash tools from the classic interface of Oracle BI prior to OAS launch to the newer Data Visualization and Oracle Analytics Cloud interfaces, including dashboards and metadata, is currently a cumbersome process. Improvements in this area would be highly beneficial. Additionally, the administration of the cloud, particularly the startup of services and linking of the WebLogic server and integrated components, takes longer than desired. In today's enterprise landscape, waiting forty minutes for the server to be operational is quite lengthy; ideally, this process should take a maximum of four minutes. It would be excellent to incorporate metadata management as an integral part of the Oracle Analytics Cloud. When dealing with integrated data from various sources, tracking data lineage and the entire data life cycle, from sources to report development and the mapping of reports to specific dashboards, should be seamlessly managed within the Oracle Analytics Cloud. This would eliminate the need for additional tools. Drawing a comparison, tools like Tableau have a feature enabling metadata management, making it easier to trace the complete data lineage of reports. Managing over seven hundred and thirty-six business dashboards, the metadata management capability within Tableau simplified the process of understanding how reports were developed, including details like associated tables, users, linked views, materialized views, data segmentations, ETL jobs, and the data warehouse stages. Enhancing metadata tracking within the Oracle Analytics Cloud layout would facilitate easy and practical management of the complete data life cycle, encompassing user accessibility and report permissions."
"One of the major issues is that Oracle Analytics Cloud is not user-friendly, requiring skilled people with proper certifications to work with it successfully."
"As with most BI tools, the visualizations can be made much nicer. Currently, it has standard visualizations. They've been adding new visualizations, but we see animated visualizations from other vendors. It would be nice to have similar visualizations, such as the swarming visualizations, which are fairly new and very popular at the moment. I haven't seen that with Oracle. That would be nice."
"Its machine learning and visualization capabilities can be improved. There should be more visualization options."
"Its FAW feature has limitations in terms of usage."
"One of the major issues is that Oracle Analytics Cloud is not user-friendly, requiring skilled people with proper certifications to work with it successfully."
"Analytics Cloud allows you to merge various data types and structure data from multiple sources."
"The scalability has room for improvement."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved."
"This solution is complex to configure and administer."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"SAP BusinessObjects is actually losing popularity within our company because people find the user interface and the way things are set up not to be as easy as many other tools that are on the market, like Qlik and things like that."
"When we implemented BusinessObjects, the setup was straightforward. After SAP bought BusinessObjects, it gradually became more and more stepwise. There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product's pricing a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"The price is reasonable; it's quite a bit lower than Tableau and Spotfire."
"The product’s pricing is expensive. However, feature-wise, it fits the requirements of enterprise customers."
"Bottom line, the cost is really, really cheap compared to other solutions. Oracle has made a huge effort on the pricing."
"The tool's pricing is not unreasonable or non-competitive."
"Oracle Analytics Cloud's pricing is generally higher than that of other vendors."
"It is an expensive platform."
"I would rate it a five out of five in terms of the value received for the price charge."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"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 is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"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."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
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Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
14%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which Oracle product is better - OBIEE or Analytics Cloud?
Oracle OBIEE is designed to be relatively easy to set up and has a helpful customer support staff at the ready to assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What do you like most about Oracle Analytics Cloud?
The ability to quickly search for and access relevant data is crucial.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Analytics Cloud?
The pricing of Oracle Analytics Cloud is quite expensive, fitting for a premium tool. However, the cost raises expectations for partner support that are not met, especially for smaller companies wh...
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...
What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?
What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
 

Also Known As

Oracle Analytics Cloud Service, OAC, Oracle Data Visualization, Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service, ODV
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sejong Hospital
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Analytics Cloud vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.