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SAP Lumira [EOL] vs Tableau Enterprise comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 15, 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 Lumira [EOL]
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tableau Enterprise
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
309
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (2nd), Reporting (2nd), Data Visualization (1st), Embedded BI (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Uzair Faruqi - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Data Science at Mjunction Services
Ease of developing dashboards and receiving strong technical support have enabled efficient data visualization
Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau. As a developer, I can develop an on-demand report in Python quite easily, but exposing a REST API on the Tableau platform is not a very easy task. AI enablement is an area for improvement for Tableau, and that is something they might have to work upon. I have heard that ThoughtSpot is quite better in this regard, but the cost of ThoughtSpot is much higher. ThoughtSpot has lots of natural language-based report generation features that Tableau lacks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
"The ability to merge enriched data from different sources and also to connect to SAP HANA live data is also embedded in SAP HANA live analytics which cuts down time to deliver a solution to users and helps power users to design their own Lumira stories without any need for IT."
"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 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."
"Geographic hierarchy and the ability to connect with SAP sources, such as CRM, ERP, and BW."
"Within an hour or so, we had actually a better visualization of the data."
"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 attractive feature for our users is the ease of visualizing data in a meaningful manner."
"It's a powerful business intelligence tool and is recognised as the cream of the crop for its visual-based data discovery that helps achieve our goals by responding faster to changes and needs in the market."
"In particular, I believe in the ease that Tableau provides for generating statistics and content in real time."
"Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly."
"We are much more nimble in our ability to provide tactical data and deploy scalable enterprise dashboards and visualizations to staff within the organization."
"Tableau is undisputedly the number one analytical product in the world."
"Within about 20 minutes of playing around I was able to quickly make fantastic looking, incredibly useful charts that I struggled to make in Excel or other data discovery tools."
"The solution is being delivered to our customer, who appreciates the insights generated from the reports."
 

Cons

"Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"The Cloud/Edge version of SAP Lumira still 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."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
"Obviously, it is not very scalable with large data sets. Hence, it becomes slow and clunky when large data sets are introduced."
"Tableau can be a little slow when loading, and it can fail with higher gigs or terabytes of data."
"Share-ability. If your audience isn’t using Tableau, getting them to see and use the insights can be challenging."
"With Tableau, when you're dealing with very large datasets, it can be slow so the performance is an area that can be improved."
"I would say they could improve the data blending within the desktop version."
"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."
"A strict security measure is needed. I believe it is weak in terms of security."
"Most of the problems in Tableau Online that I have noticed have to do with performance or weird, inexplicable bugs that I can't pin down. For example, you might try unloading some data, and you'll be waiting for a long time without anything happening."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"For our organization, the cost hasn't been an issue."
"There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair."
"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."
"The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money."
"Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI."
"It's an annual fee with everything included but it's quite expensive."
"It is more expensive than other solutions."
"The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
14%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise67
Large Enterprise184
 

Questions from the Community

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It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik Sense, Power BI, OBIEE, Tableau, etc. I have recently started using Cognos Enter...
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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...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use. This relatively short amount of time can make all the difference for companies ...
 

Also Known As

SAP BusinessObjects Lumira
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP Lumira [EOL] vs. Tableau Enterprise and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
886,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.