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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 platform is a complete enterprise-level tool where everything is integrated to suffice your requirement."
"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."
"The most valuable SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform feature are metadata service layers."
"A very creative tool to present the data in graphical and pictorial form, so as to make better decision for the growth of the organization."
"Web Intelligence for its ad-hoc ability and user interface for allowing business users to create reports without depending on the IT department."
"It is definitely useful as an integrated platform for medium or large enterprises which require a modern information management solution."
"It's provided us with best practice reports out of the box for various modules, as well as an interface for creating adhoc reports with more analytical capabilities."
"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."
"I would recommend using SAP Lumira because the development of dashboards is easy, and they have a good look and feel."
"We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way."
"This product is amazing and changes how people think of the relationship between IT and businesses."
"The dynamic creation of dashboards and the quick visualization is the key feature."
"Beautiful visualizations."
"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."
"This is a tool that gives more power to the user."
 

Cons

"The amount of resources used has caused the system to fail from time to time."
"BusinessObjects is not that user-friendly."
"On the minus side, there is still a lot to be done on the mobile side to make Web Intelligence truly seamless between the desktop and mobile versions and I would like to see SAP pay a lot more attention to this."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"I would like to see their data visualization products enhanced and made more robust and easier to implement."
"The stability is again dependent on your sizing activity. If you don't have enough hardware and use it a lot, the tool will crash."
"We'd like to have SAP notes better incorporated. There is a lot of patching. It could be a lighter solution."
"The cost of this product, so every company is not suitable to use it. Because of the very huge amount of integrations, every organization can not use it."
"It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions."
"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."
"Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents."
"We definitely encountered issues with stability. We found a lot of bugs throughout the amount of time that we've been using the product."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"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."
"Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Its price is fair."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"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%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
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

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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
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