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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

"If anything, BO is great at controlling the user's interface eg highly user friendly capable."
"The scheduling and publication features are very useful."
"SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn."
"It is definitely useful as an integrated platform for medium or large enterprises which require a modern information management solution."
"The combination of IDT and Web Intelligence has taken some of the burden of report creation off of our central data team."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"The most valuable function of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is the universe, so customers can build their own reports without programming skills."
"ROI is absolute."
"It is fairly easy and fast when it comes to using it."
"Within an hour or so, we had actually a better visualization of the data."
"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."
"I think rapid development, geospatial coding, using it to connect to multiple data sources are all good selling points for it."
"This product is amazing and changes how people think of the relationship between IT and businesses."
"Now, it seems to be one of the best SAP dashboard/chart/data analysis tools available."
"It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
"The ability to merge enriched data from different sources and also to connect to SAP HANA live data is also embedded in SAP HANA live analytics which cuts down time to deliver a solution to users and helps power users to design their own Lumira stories without any need for IT."
 

Cons

"According to our experience, SAP BO is too heavy and very difficult for customers with medium, or smaller-sized businesses to install and maintain."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform can be improved in that the user interface needs much improvement, as not everyone has a complete understanding of the components."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"I can't recommend BusinessObjects because its usage is limited, and it can't provide a new solution for end-users."
"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."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"The UI could be updated a bit."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use."
"Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow."
"It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side."
"An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
"It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"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."
"Its price is fair."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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."
"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
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
Construction Company
14%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
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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