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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs SAP Lumira [EOL] 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

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th), Data Visualization (4th)
SAP Lumira [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Rafal Zaborowski - PeerSpot reviewer
Supply Chain Manager, Proxy, Matw Global D&I Council Memeber at SAUERESSIG Group
It's stable, it keeps on improving and the technical support is excellent
I think a lot of users aren't having fun using SAP because it requires putting in a lot of information by keyboard directly because it requires some coding, so this is one area for improvement. From a user point of view, SAP is a complex system where you can learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly. In the next release of SAP, I want it to have a friendlier menu for its users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ive yet to find a bi tool that can match SAP’s offering, and Ive implemented all of them."
"We find the product to be very stable."
"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."
"We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management."
"The most valuable SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform feature are metadata service layers."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"If anything, BO is great at controlling the user's interface eg highly user friendly capable."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
"SAP Lumira is the best system in the world, at least in my opinion. I like that it's a stable system and that many people in my company have development experience in SAP Lumira. The solution keeps on improving and has excellent support."
"This is a tool that gives more power to the user."
"The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards."
"It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
"It provides better, more robust ability to visualize data than in Excel or some of the other desktop tools that are out there, providing users the ability to identify actionable trends in their data sets that they normally wouldn't see, like in a spreadsheet or tabular data, a report."
"I like the integration, so it's easy to integrate different data sources."
"Now, it seems to be one of the best SAP dashboard/chart/data analysis tools available."
"The most valuable features of SAP Lumira are the dashboards, geographical elements, and graph filtering, and the usage is similar to a website which makes it easy to use."
 

Cons

"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"We had stability issues, mainly with the integration of the SAP BI products with SAP’s EIM products (Data Services, Information Steward)."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"In Design Studio version 1.6, when creating a custom geo map component, we are not able to associate a shape layer with data sources."
"Technical Support: Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP"
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"BusinessObjects is not that user-friendly."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and I don't recall Lumira being able to do that."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
"It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions."
"I am happy with the product, but they could improve in the discovery of the product."
"The Cloud/Edge version of SAP Lumira still needs to be more user friendly."
"An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization."
"There have been some issues; the product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"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.​"
"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."
"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."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"PowerBI is way more capable at a much better price point: $10 per user without all the associated setup costs."
"In terms of cost, SAP Lumira is less affordable."
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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
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, Apache and others in Data Visualization. Updated: June 2026.
906,887 professionals have used our research since 2012.