No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs SAP Lumira [EOL] comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

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 (4th), Data Visualization (3rd)
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

"Reporting from SAP Business Objects Web Intelligence is amazing, and gives users the ability to quickly access data from existing universes and/or relevant data sources, without the need to involve a functional business analyst or financial analyst."
"I chose Business Objects because it's easy to use."
"It can process big volumes of data fast."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"The SAP BusinessObjects product suite is made of different products; this review refers to the Web Intelligence product, whose user-friendly interface enables non-IT-literate persons to create their own queries without needing SQL knowledge, and that has been the case for a very long time."
"The feature that allows pivot users to create the report dashboards and run them when they want with a lot of flexibility with the drill-downs is very useful."
"To share a metadata service layer, you don't need to add a user or write a SQL query. Instead, you can present a raw database to your end user."
"I think rapid development, geospatial coding, using it to connect to multiple data sources are all good selling points for it."
"We’ve created several dashboards that display large sets of data in an insightful and easily digestible way."
"It seemed to be fairly user friendly."
"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 solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
"The most value that Lumira provides is in its ability to consume the Business Objects universe."
"It's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
"The best feature is the ease of developing dashboards."
 

Cons

"This should be fixed so that companies don't require three separate licenses for three separate applications."
"Most of the Apps right now are into dashboarding. This tool, for the Crystal Reports in the phase I'm primarily working on, does not have those dashboarding capabilities, like in the other advanced tools like Power BI or ClickView, and compared to them the dashboard generation is not that great."
"There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
"The product lacks the ability to manage universal connectivity, so it needs to be made better for users."
"While I recommend the SAP Analytics Cloud version, I do not recommend the on-premises version."
"It needs to be more user friendly for web use."
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has always struggled with dashboarding."
"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."
"It needs to have more complex and enriched chart functions."
"I did encounter issues with stability and performance. It really takes a long, long time, if you want to do analysis on viewed data."
"There have been some issues; the product itself is going through the improvement stages and the newer versions seem to be more stable."
"I would look at the geospatial part of it which doesn't seem work well as when you look at converting that for your maps, it is a little cumbersome, and it's not as accurate."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
"An area of improvement, for sure, is the flexibility of the visualization."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"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."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"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."
"Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users."
"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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Visualization solutions are best for your needs.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
19%
Construction Company
15%
Government
8%
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: October 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.