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Knowage vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

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

Knowage
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
33rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (23rd)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
112
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is 2.3%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform2.3%
Knowage0.9%
Other96.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

BS
Software Engineer at syntegra
Open-source with great embedding capabilities but the dashboards could be better
I know the initial setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take a long time to deploy. Even on your own personal computer, when you want to try it out, it doesn't take too long to get it running. For the initial setup, I'd say it's maybe a four out of five in terms of how easy it is. You need to add these Java dependencies and so forth, which can be a bit boring, however, it's almost perfect. To deploy Knowage usually takes about a day. In terms of the implementation strategy, it's just following the instructions that they give us on the installation and then just knowing how to handle the process. Usually, there is a group of engineers who do that for us and manage the server itself. If a team is knowledgeable, then it doesn't take a long time. When you need a new instance, it's very quick. The implementation strategy is based on just following instructions on the installation process from Knowage. For deployment and maintenance, we need just maybe two people simply to monitor the traffic coming in. However, it's maintained by people who were doing other jobs like maintaining our other server. They just monitor the Knowage server and make sure that it's up and running and that there are no bugs. There are not too many bugs coming out from the debugger.
Declan Dempsey - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Keyrus
Provides efficient data reporting while needing easier deployment and improved interface
Users tend to put everything into Excel, though I try to discourage this. The best feature about it for me, and for them, is the fact that you have a universe that is well made. This means you don't have those months that get assigned. You can just get to the point and get a report very quickly. Unfortunately, in some ways, it's a double-edged sword because it becomes more of a self-service ETL, even for the reporting team. If you have a decent universe and you just want to quickly get something together, it's very usable. Compared to Click, you can drop those reports very quickly.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"Customer Service: Excellent."
"The embedding feature is great."
"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"SpagoBI makes delivering reports to our clients very easy."
"The most valuable features to us are application implementation, development, and analysis."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"It's improved decision making process."
"The Universe in BO ensures consistent coding for business rules etc."
"The initial setup of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform was easy since the solution is user-friendly."
"If anything, BO is great at controlling the user's interface eg highly user friendly capable."
"It integrates well with BW and HANA, which demonstrates strong data integration capabilities."
"Mostly, we have seen businesses run faster because they use SAP BOBJ."
"It provides every feature you're looking for to perform OLAP and OLTP-based transactional and analytical reporting."
"Universe Designer is the product's most valuable feature because you can manage joins or derived tables as you wish."
 

Cons

"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"The demands of some jobs would slow Spago and lock the site, preventing any other job from processing."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"It would be better if more resources were available to help us learn how to use it. I wanted to use Knowage for a more extended period, but learning materials around the product were not really available and were not really straightforward. I've also seen inconsistencies between versions. For example, under the tools, especially in the cockpit, the way you create reports is now different. You will also find some configurations within a particular state, like a line chart, which differs from version to version. I think consistency is an essential feature in a product, especially for business intelligence products."
"We had stability issues."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"The dashboard components could be better."
"The SAP BOBJ suite needs to be more stable and seamlessly integrated with SAP BW and SAP HANA (one-time variable creation, etc.)."
"It needs to be more user friendly for web use."
"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."
"There are a lot of limitation in SAP BW especially for scheduling, which can limit the full utilization of BOBJ, but there is a solution for it all if you think out of the box."
"If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"We're an Epic shop, and Epic is moving away from Crystal. It would be nice if it had tighter integration with products like Epic. It would be awesome to have better integration with third-party products."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"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.​"
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"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."
"Its price is fair."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise67
 

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...
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...
 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FIAT Group, Italian air navigation service provider, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Telecom Italia, ASL Genovese, San Giovanni Battista University Hospital
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.