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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs SAP Lumira [EOL] comparison

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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

"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."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"It includes valuable features like a dashboard, reporting, visualization, etc."
"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."
"The features which the solution has been awesome. The way the data is fetched from the database, and the queries are executed, is unique using the Universe of Business Objects. That makes it unique and we could not find another solution that functions in a similar way. It's has a great way of receiving and executing queries."
"The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use."
"I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform's most valuable features are it has a great presentation layer. We can develop the presentation layer with drag-and-drop capabilities. For end-users and for our interns in the company can create reports and do their data analysis processes or works by using the objects that we created on the presentation layer by themselves."
"This solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
"I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel."
"It's very easy to import data and also to create formulas and so on, and it made creating charts, especially bubble charts, really easy and very powerful, helping me build impressive metrics for the team around surgery times, supplies used, and expense analysis."
"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."
"It seemed to be fairly user friendly."
"I think rapid development, geospatial coding, using it to connect to multiple data sources are all good selling points for it."
"We chose it because of its ability to have a selection of data from various sources, and it's an easy reporting tool for business analysts to use."
"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

"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective."
"The dynamic scheduling capabilities, the performance and ability to handle large data sets when connected via BICS to a BW warehouse needs a lot of work."
"It needs to be more flexible for the end-user."
"If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it."
"The technical support for general issues gives us a good response, but for certain critical issues, it can takes four weeks to obtain a response."
"Technical Support: Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP"
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive. If you deal with a huge amount of data, you can go with BusinessObjects. However, if you are a medium-sized company with a modest amount of data, you can opt for another solution."
"It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions."
"Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination."
"I'm not a fan of using SAP Lumira 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 Lumira is a complex system to learn and teach, so another area for improvement in the solution is that it needs to be more user-friendly."
"A lot of bugs keep coming up when we connect to HANA or create our custom color palette."
"Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"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."
"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."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"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
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
20%
Construction Company
15%
Government
8%
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
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