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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs Toucan Toco 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...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
5th
Ranking in Data Visualization
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Toucan Toco
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
26th
Ranking in Data Visualization
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Toucan Toco is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence2.9%
Toucan Toco0.7%
Other96.4%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
Jeffrey Richter - PeerSpot reviewer
VP of IT at Claridge Products
Real-time executive visibility has replaced spreadsheets and drives daily sales decisions
Toucan Toco offers excellent features, including the quick ability to create Stories and KPIs based on the data that we're storing in our data warehouse. We leverage the functionality within Toucan Toco to quickly build out a code-free environment, providing a code-free way of sharing both graphs and KPIs to track and deliver visibility to key data elements. Toucan Toco has positively impacted our organization because we previously were using Excel spreadsheets to share data out to the team, and now we're using Toucan Toco to share information in real time. This shift to real-time sharing has brought clarity to consistent metrics and real-time visibility to activity.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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."
"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 initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"The platform uses a lot of Java technologies so the performance and system-level management are tricky because it needs a lot of resources."
"The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC."
"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."
"It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently."
"Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use New Undelete of Public objects.. New Dashboard of overall environment"
"Toucan Toco has positively impacted our organization because we previously were using Excel spreadsheets to share data out to the team, and now we're using Toucan Toco to share information in real time."
 

Cons

"Technical Support: Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP"
"​This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"It needs to be more user friendly for web use."
"According to our experience, SAP BO is too heavy and very difficult for customers with medium, or smaller-sized businesses to install and maintain."
"On the downside, we have had some challenges with upgrades."
"There are areas of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform that need improvement, particularly in licensing, which can make it complex and expensive for users."
"Because of their licensing model, they are losing the market."
"I chose nine because Stories can cascade on top of each other and be a bit complicated when they create multiple data sets underneath the Stories to manage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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.​"
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"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."
Information not available
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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
9%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
No data available
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Toucan Toco?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was a very clean and quick process through negotiation, and it was a very fair and competitive process.
What needs improvement with Toucan Toco?
Toucan Toco can be improved with the addition of the AI functionality that they are working on, which will be a great value add once it's available. I chose nine because Stories can cascade on top ...
What is your primary use case for Toucan Toco?
Our main use case for Toucan Toco is to share business analytics across the executive staff. A quick, specific example of how my team uses it to share analytics with the executive staff is that we ...
 

Also Known As

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Heineken, GE, PnG, Sodexo, Banque postale, Groupe PSA, JCDecaux, Marques Avenue, Nexity
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: October 2026.
916,582 professionals have used our research since 2012.