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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs SAP Lumira [EOL] comparison

 

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 (5th), Data Visualization (4th)
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

"SAP Business Objects Data Services is user friendly and easy to learn."
"The solution's user security is extremely effective. You can profile very well. All the users and all the functionality is protected and that includes information and data segregation."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
"The nicest part of BOE remains the semantic layer (Designer), giving developers a powerful way to encapsulate business logic and push it out to users through Webi or WRC."
"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"I chose Business Objects because it's easy to use."
"It's a reliable, stable, secure, and mature tool for business intelligence and other functions, like standard reports."
"​The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"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 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."
"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."
"Now, it seems to be one of the best SAP dashboard/chart/data analysis tools available."
"It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
"It is a product that's easy to learn and understand, with the ability to create dynamic visualizations and various integration options including next-to real-time."
"This solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
 

Cons

"The calculation engine requires some improvement."
"The solution is not good for self-services, they can improve in this area."
"We need to speed up the performance of our tool because it is slower compared to the SAP Analytics Cloud tool."
"Technical Support: Fair to Poor..Business Objects sometimes gets lost in the quagmire of SAP"
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."
"Integrations with things like Active Directory and LDAP tend to be a little complex."
"The foreground handling is disastrous."
"There are many communication issues when we are trying to connect to other servers or platforms, establishing the connection and maintaining it as per our expectations."
"The Cloud/Edge version of SAP Lumira still needs to be more user friendly."
"I think probably what I was trying to do at the time was create some sort of map if you will. I work a lot with freight data, transportation data and I've been trying to find a solution to show volumes and distances out of a specific point so if we've got a distribution center in Dallas, Texas, something that I can just drop the data in and by zip code it will show a heat map of the zip codes that we're shipping to and I don't recall Lumira being able to do that."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
"There have been some issues; the product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable."
"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 was very useful for me, but now I have more needs, and I have to move faster because I am responsible for a lot of data, and a lot of information that I have to provide to the directors and VPs."
"Lumira's capabilities feel like that of a store app with the intuitiveness of a desktop app, which is not a good combination."
"From an enterprise supported tool, I find that a little wanting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Its price is fair."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"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
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
16%
Outsourcing Company
16%
Government
9%
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

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...
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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
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Splunk, SAP and others in Data Visualization. Updated: August 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.