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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

"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."
"The platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use New Undelete of Public objects.. New Dashboard of overall environment"
"The combination of IDT and Web Intelligence has taken some of the burden of report creation off of our central data team."
"If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better."
"During the first of the 10 years we used it, it was a very valuable reporting product."
"Through the use of Business Intelligence reporting and scheduling features, reports are generated and automatically sent according to a schedule. This has freed up countless hours spent performing the same tasks, month over month."
"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"This solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
"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."
"We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way."
"I think rapid development, geospatial coding, using it to connect to multiple data sources are all good selling points for it."
"The dynamic creation of dashboards and the quick visualization is the key feature."
"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."
"Geographic hierarchy and the ability to connect with SAP sources, such as CRM, ERP, and BW."
 

Cons

"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"While I recommend the SAP Analytics Cloud version, I do not recommend the on-premises version."
"It should have a better integration with Excel."
"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."
"Lot of issues, because it is a huge product."
"Previously there was the Discussion board function, but it was not good and no one used it."
"We feel that the tool is very complex in terms of implementing the dashboard; lots of coding and performance issues, and we require particular skillsets and resources as regular users cannot understand it."
"If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it."
"Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"We definitely encountered issues with stability. We found a lot of bugs throughout the amount of time that we've been using the product."
"There have been some issues; the product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable."
"From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and I don't recall Lumira being able to do that."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"Its price is fair."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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."
"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
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
15%
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, SAP and others in Data Visualization. Updated: August 2026.
909,647 professionals have used our research since 2012.