Adaptive Insights vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

Workday and SAP are both solutions in the Data Visualization category. Workday is ranked #20, while SAP is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.3. Workday holds a 1.7% mindshare in DV, compared to SAP’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

4,092 Views
1,064 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Read 114 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence reviews

9,322 Views
2,703 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 15, 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Adaptive Insights are competitive analytics solutions in the business intelligence sector. While Adaptive Insights excels in financial planning, SAP BusinessObjects is the choice for complex BI scenarios due to its strong data scalability and flexible reporting.

Features: SAP BusinessObjects provides comprehensive reporting, data visualization, and high scalability for large data volumes. It supports complex BI needs with robust data security and integration. Adaptive Insights is strong in budgeting, forecasting, and what-if analysis, offering seamless integration with ERP systems and efficient financial analysis.

Room for Improvement: SAP BusinessObjects could enhance ease of use for non-technical users, reduce deployment complexity, and improve cloud capabilities. Adaptive Insights may improve data integration flexibility, expand non-financial analytics features, and enhance real-time data processing speeds.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAP BusinessObjects requires expert configuration, but includes vast customer support. Its deployment can be complex. Adaptive Insights offers fast, cloud-based deployment, allowing easy integration and adoption with an intuitive user interface.

Pricing and ROI: SAP BusinessObjects involves higher initial costs reflective of its enterprise capabilities. It provides significant ROI in complex data environments. Adaptive Insights offers a more budget-friendly pricing model with quicker ROI, appealing to organizations focused on financial forecasting and planning.

To learn more, read our detailed Adaptive Insights vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Report (Updated: May 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

May 2026

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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

Adaptive Insights

Ranking in Data Visualization

20th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (11th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (3rd), Reporting (25th), ESG Reporting Software (14th)

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Ranking in Data Visualization

5th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

114

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 1.7%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 3.1%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence	3.1%
Adaptive Insights	1.7%
Other	95.2%

Data Visualization

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight

Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models

For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.

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TarunKumar7

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."

"The reporting tools are what I gain the most benefit from."

"Adaptive saves us huge hours in budgeting, for each roll-up it saves us two hours at least, and we usually have more than 20 roll-ups."

"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."

"It's very stable."

"It helps develop a more unified work format throughout the company."

"This solution transformed the way both of my companies did reporting."

"Automated reporting."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"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."

"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."

"The product works well, but is only as good as the servers it uses."

"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."

"This solution provides much greater and faster access to information for a wide mixture of users and supports and promotes a common view of information across the organisation."

"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 most valuable function of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is the universe, so customers can build their own reports without programming skills."

"What I find most valuable is that you can run the reports anytime and you can receive the report at a scheduled time."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pros

Cons

"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."

"It's complex; thinking about the business models and capabilities in Adaptive."

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."

"Discovery (the data visualization module): Needs to catch up with BI leaders, such as MS and Tableau. E.g., sorting by amounts in column charts and page slicers to control all visuals."

"Needing to focus on upgrades for all industries, including CPG."

"We do have issues getting information on our customer success turnover."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."

"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."

"It is limited for us because SAP is shifting toward the cloud, and we can't use a cloud solution for SAP BusinessObjects. SAP introduced a product called PlusTimes one or two years ago and another one that I believe was called Automatic BI. This tool is more powerful than BusinessObjects and other tools because it's provided in the cloud."

"There is room for improvement in providing more user-friendly and versatile reporting options."

"There are a lot of stability related issues with all SAP BI products, especially compared with similar Oracle, Cognos or QlickView tools."

"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."

"The admin features for disk space management need work. It's very difficult to manage the disk space by the application; good admin features and not included to allow you to do that. I don't believe that is in the latest version of the product either."

"Sometimes encounter some bugs. SAP seems to have taken the approach of letting the users test the product lately."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's affordable."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."

"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."

"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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 is not cost-effective. It is expensive."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6663

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…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	34
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	67

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

SAP BTP is an expensive solution.

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Comparisons

Infor dEPM vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 7% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 6% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 4% of the time

Planful vs Adaptive Insights

Compared 4% of the time

More Adaptive Insights Competitors

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 23% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 7% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle Analytics Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

May 2026

Download Adaptive Insights product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

May 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence report

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform offers powerful tools for enterprise reporting and data visualization, enhancing strategic decision-making through robust integration and secure analytics capabilities.

Designed for comprehensive enterprise reporting, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform integrates seamlessly with SAP ERP, supporting organizations in creating detailed financial, operational, and academic reports. The platform allows data manipulation across multiple sources using a semantic layer and provides intuitive tools like Web Intelligence and Lumira for user-driven report creation. It features centralized management, versatile connectors, and supports large-scale data analytics critical for business forecasting.

What are the key features of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

Integration Capabilities: Seamless connection with SAP ERP and various data sources.
Dynamic Scheduling: Automate report generation for timely insights.
Robust Security: Protects data with stringent security measures.
Semantic Layer: Simplifies data manipulation across sources.
Intuitive Tools: Facilitates user-driven report creation with Web Intelligence and Lumira.

What benefits should be considered in reviews?

Comprehensive Reporting: Enables detailed and accurate enterprise reports.
Decision-Making Support: Enhances strategic decisions with reliable data.
Scalability: Efficiently manages large-scale and complex data analytics.
Versatility in Analysis: Offers flexibility for ad hoc analysis and KPI monitoring.

Organizations across sectors like healthcare, education, insurance, and retail leverage SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for its capability in facilitating detailed reports and integrating dashboards for key performance indicators. Its extensive reporting features support in-depth analytics vital for business prediction and decision-making processes.

SAP

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

May 2026

Free Report: Adaptive Insights vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

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