Pentaho Business Analytics and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform both compete in the business intelligence sector. SAP BusinessObjects is often seen as having the advantage due to its complete enterprise BI functionalities.
Features: Pentaho Business Analytics offers strong ETL capabilities, particularly with Pentaho Data Integration, and benefits from community-driven plugin development. Its open-source nature is attractive to cost-conscious businesses. SAP BusinessObjects provides comprehensive enterprise integration, excels within SAP ecosystems, and boasts robust semantic layer functionalities through its universe designer.
Room for Improvement: Pentaho needs updates for its dashboard and data visualization tools, which can seem dated. SAP BusinessObjects should enhance its dashboarding to better compete with modern tools like Tableau. Both platforms would benefit from smoother integration and more intuitive interfaces.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Pentaho is appreciated for its community support and deployment options, including on-premises and hybrid cloud, with users leveraging active open-source forums for assistance. SAP BusinessObjects provides strong enterprise-level support but could improve its technical support responsiveness and cloud options.
Pricing and ROI: Pentaho's open-source edition offers a no-cost entry point, appealing to budget-limited organizations, while its Enterprise Edition involves additional features and costs. SAP BusinessObjects is perceived as expensive, particularly due to user licensing, which might deter smaller companies, although both products offer a positive ROI.
I have seen a return on investment so far in the form of saved time and resources.
For most of my clients using the on-premises version of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, the return on investment is positive due to its affordability and ability to handle diverse reporting needs while automating information distribution.
Sometimes, they forward my ticket to the technical team, especially when my issue involves technical aspects that basis people may not be familiar with.
I have experience with SAP technical support and have supported customers, including those in financial services.
I would rate their technical support as excellent.
I rate the scalability of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform as a nine due to performance issues related to optimizing parts.
It can handle large datasets.
When they tried upgrading from 4.2 to 4.3, they found it buggy in some reports, which was quite problematic.
Pentaho Business Analytics is hard to learn and not suited for initial users as it requires knowledge of operating systems, Java, and other technical skills.
I've worked with other tools, for example, Microsoft Power BI, which is visualization-wise very strong.
We need to speed up the performance of our tool because it is slower compared to the SAP Analytics Cloud tool.
SAP BusinessObjects is expected to be phased out by 2027 as reports are moving to SAP Analytics Cloud.
Pentaho Business Analytics is priced similarly to other competitors such as QlikView and Tableau.
The price is very competitive and reliable.
I rate the pricing for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform as a seven or eight.
It is a stable product, and it can handle large datasets.
For calculations, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform outperforms all other tools such as Power BI and Tableau, showing more accuracy, reliability, and flexibility compared to all other BI tools worldwide.
One advantage of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is self-service capabilities, allowing users to do drag and drop to build their own reports and perform analyses without needing technical know-how.
The important features include a dashboard and reporting capabilities through SAP Analytics Cloud, which I consider to be a better version than the initial BusinessObjects platform.
Pentaho is an open source business intelligence company that provides a wide range of tools to help their customers better manage their businesses. These tools include data integration software, mining tools, dashboard applications, online analytical processing options, and more.
Pentaho has two product categories: There is the standard enterprise version. This is the product that comes directly from Pentaho itself with all of the benefits, features, and programs that come along with a paid application such us analysis services, dashboard design, and interactive reporting.
The alternative is an open source version, which the public is permitted to add to and tweak the product. This solution has its advantages, aside from the fact that it is free, in that there are many more people working on the project to improve its quality and breadth of functionality.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is a versatile and flexible solution for reporting and dashboards, focusing on analytics and ad hoc reporting. It can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud. The solution includes tools such as Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, SAP Lumira, and Analytical Cloud and is primarily used for comprehensive business intelligence reporting.
The most valuable features include excellent reporting features, good technical support, scalability, and the ability to translate database data into business language. The solution has helped organizations by providing analytics, monitoring KPIs, and making important decisions as a financial business.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Key Features
Reviews from Real Users
SAP BusinessObjects BI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its user-friendly dashboard, its impressive reporting and analytic features, and its ability to integrate with multiple solutions.
A managing partner at a tech services company writes, "One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."
An associate manager at a consultancy notes, "It provides flexibility for creating reports. It is very good for creating highly complex reports. I like this solution because when I buy BusinessObjects, it comes with many components, such as reporting, dashboard, and data visualization tools. Its performance is good. It is running on top of SAP BW and SAP HANA."
A manager of data analytics and interfaces at a healthcare company says, "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. It has great visualization.
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