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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."
"The features that I think are valuable in SAP Business Objects - BOBJ (WEBi, BI Launch Pad, Rich Client) are the drill down capabilities to the nitty gritty lowest level, and perform an in depth analysis from different angles."
"The level of stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches."
"During the first of the 10 years we used it, it was a very valuable reporting product."
"Business Object is truly a scalable and complete business intelligence solution for larger organizations."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
"Business users manual data-entry load has decreased, and data between different systems are consistent in almost-real time."
"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."
"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."
"Geographic hierarchy and the ability to connect with SAP sources, such as CRM, ERP, and BW."
"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 would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel."
"It is a product that's easy to learn and understand, with the ability to create dynamic visualizations and various integration options including next-to real-time."
"This solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
"Within an hour or so, we had actually a better visualization of the data."
 

Cons

"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."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"The platform's pricing needs improvement."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau."
"I am not so satisfied with the technical support because I am opening cases but it's taking too much time."
"It is not simple to use."
"The calculation engine requires some improvement."
"A lot of bugs keep coming up when we connect to HANA or create our custom color palette."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"I would look at the geospatial part of it which doesn't seem work well as when you look at converting that for your maps, it is a little cumbersome, and it's not as accurate."
"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."
"The Cloud/Edge version of SAP Lumira still needs to be more user friendly."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"There have been some issues; the product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"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."
"Its price is fair."
"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."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"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."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"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
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.