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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

"​Provides autonomy for all the business users to develop their own reports.​"
"The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all dashboards with self-service BI and are able to provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs."
"The features that I think are valuable in SAP Business Objects - BOBJ (WEBi, BI Launch Pad, Rich Client) are the drill down capabilities to the nitty gritty lowest level, and perform an in depth analysis from different angles."
"It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology."
"In my experience, the Analytics module provides the business the ability to make the appropriate decisions for improving our organization."
"There are two tools inside BusinessObjects' schematic layout called the Universal Design Tool and Information Design Tool. These are the most powerful tools that set BusinessObjects' reporting from other solutions. If my organization has 300 or 400 tables, I can combine all of them into one universe, and everyone can use that. It is just a schematic layout that does not hold any data but the table relationships."
"​It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities.​"
"It is the best product for business analysis and help to grow the business."
"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."
"Beautiful visualizations."
"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."
"SAP Lumira is the best system in the world, at least in my opinion. I like that it's a stable system and that many people in my company have development experience in SAP Lumira. The solution keeps on improving and has excellent support."
"It seemed to be fairly user friendly."
"Now, it seems to be one of the best SAP dashboard/chart/data analysis tools available."
"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."
 

Cons

"The initial setup could be simplified."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform can be improved by developing another module of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform to integrate with the existing system."
"Its data visualization tool is not as good as Power BI and Tableau. Currently, for data visualization, you need to spend more money to buy another solution such as Power BI or Tableau. It is also very hard to integrate it with other third-party solutions. Its integration with other solutions should be improved."
"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"The dynamic scheduling capabilities, the performance and ability to handle large data sets when connected via BICS to a BW warehouse needs a lot of work."
"Technical support may not always be timely or effective."
"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."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"Each quarterly upgrade has new features, but then existing features tend to break. This is highly frustrating and affects existing Lumira documents."
"Don't waste your time. Lumira falls short of its competitors in this space both in capabilities and in ease of use."
"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."
"We definitely encountered issues with stability. We found a lot of bugs throughout the amount of time that we've been using the product."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"Its price is fair."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"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.​"
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"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."
"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."
"PowerBI is way more capable at a much better price point: $10 per user without all the associated setup costs."
"In terms of cost, SAP Lumira is less affordable."
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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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Construction Company
17%
Government
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
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, Apache and others in Data Visualization. Updated: May 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.