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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 (4th), Data Visualization (3rd)
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 Universe in BO ensures consistent coding for business rules etc."
"What I find useful in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is that it has a lot of flexibilities, where you can develop so many reports, and it is able to connect to multiple source systems."
"The reporting features the solution offers are excellent."
"I rate SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform an eight out of ten."
"In order to grow, you really need some sort of analysis element to help guide you, and this solution fulfills that need."
"​The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"The combination of IDT and Web Intelligence has taken some of the burden of report creation off of our central data team."
"It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology."
"We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way."
"Beautiful visualizations."
"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."
"This is a tool that gives more power to the user."
"This product is amazing and changes how people think of the relationship between IT and businesses."
"The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards."
"It is fairly easy and fast when it comes to using it."
 

Cons

"SAP does force users to manage it a certain way, specifically around queries, and does not integrate well with other platforms, or lacks a certain level of flexibility."
"Reports/Dashboards on RDBMS cannot handle or scale the demands of the latest data analytics solutions."
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."
"The product lacks the ability to manage universal connectivity, so it needs to be made better for users."
"Fairly straightforward but, not as easy as the vendor made it sound."
"It has inadequate data analysis and data profiling, which has increased testing and user acceptance duration."
"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."
"There are definitely some areas of improvement (i.e. interface, etc.), just as every product needs improvements to meet changing demands over time."
"Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use."
"It would be great to have more ETL capabilities so that the user can do more cleansing/mining on his/her side."
"Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination."
"From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting."
"Lumira was very useful for me, but now I have more needs, and I have to move faster because I am responsible for a lot of data, and a lot of information that I have to provide to the directors and VPs."
"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."
"Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow."
"A lot of bugs keep coming up when we connect to HANA or create our custom color palette."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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.​"
"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."
"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."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"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
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
19%
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, SAP and others in Data Visualization. Updated: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.