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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

"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
"A very creative tool to present the data in graphical and pictorial form, so as to make better decision for the growth of the organization."
"The solution has been extremely stable."
"We find that we can scale it as needed."
"BusinessObject's most useful feature is the semantic layer, which offers us the flexibility to go for ad hoc reporting."
"We have used all the business objects tools, but this one satisfies all of the business requirements in an optimized way."
"Ive yet to find a bi tool that can match SAP’s offering, and Ive implemented all of them."
"It seemed to be fairly user friendly."
"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."
"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."
"We were all sitting in a conference room, four of us, and we watched a YouTube video, which is eight minutes long, and after that we were able to build a couple of dashboards by ourselves, just from that one watch and learn session."
"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 best feature is the ease of developing dashboards."
"I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel."
"The dynamic creation of dashboards and the quick visualization is the key feature."
 

Cons

"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."
"There are areas of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform that need improvement, particularly in licensing, which can make it complex and expensive for users."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to be improved performance-wise. The look and feel of this application, its scalability, setup, and technical support also need improvement."
"The dashboard tool is called Lumira and it is very uncomfortable for developers to use. They should improve this in the future."
"The technical support has been a challenge when it comes to finding the correct support analyst who is familiar with how the various product components integrate."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an outdated solution that is missing many features."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"A lot of bugs keep coming up when we connect to HANA or create our custom color palette."
"I am happy with the product, but they could improve in the discovery of the product."
"From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
"It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side."
"Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is fair."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"​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 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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"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.​"
"In terms of cost, SAP Lumira is less affordable."
"PowerBI is way more capable at a much better price point: $10 per user without all the associated setup costs."
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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

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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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