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

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs SAP Lumira [EOL] comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 15, 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 (6th), Data Visualization (5th)
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

EO
Data Analytics Manager at Dangote Industries Limited
Solution empowers self-service reporting and delivers comprehensive performance insights
Empowering business users means they should be able to work independently without depending on the developer. 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 platform has many drivers that I can use to connect to virtually all available databases, making it easy to integrate with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and many others. With the cloud version, I can fetch data on-premises and to the cloud for analysis easily. It is so flexible that I can make choices for fetching data. For authentication in an SAP environment, I can choose to integrate with SAP logon for SSO or use AD authentication for convenience, along with the flexible integration options.
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

"It will give you better performance if your warehouse is also on SAP Business Warehouse."
"In order to grow, you really need some sort of analysis element to help guide you, and this solution fulfills that need."
"Web Intelligence for its ad-hoc ability and user interface for allowing business users to create reports without depending on the IT department."
"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."
"The solution I built replaced a manual process that would take 3 weeks and provided an automated solution."
"The scheduling and publication features are very useful."
"Semantic Layer (Universes), ease of use New Undelete of Public objects.. New Dashboard of overall environment"
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"It is fairly easy and fast when it comes to using it."
"It provides better, more robust ability to visualize data than in Excel or some of the other desktop tools that are out there, providing users the ability to identify actionable trends in their data sets that they normally wouldn't see, like in a spreadsheet or tabular data, a report."
"Beautiful visualizations."
"This solution is easy to use, and it is unbelievable to use for operations and exploration."
"This is a tool that gives more power to the user."
"The most value that Lumira provides is in its ability to consume the Business Objects universe."
"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's more of a user-friendly tool, it's easy, and it speeds up the process."
 

Cons

"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"More thorough testing of Service Packs before release."
"This should be fixed so that companies don't require three separate licenses for three separate applications."
"The interface could be slicker and more user-friendly."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"The technical support has been a challenge when it comes to finding the correct support analyst who is familiar with how the various product components integrate."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is lacking dashboards and this would be the only reason we are looking for another solution."
"SAP Lumira's scalability is very limited. Every time we have to involve IT if there is a change in the dashboard."
"It has some limitations when operating BW data, and has limited functions when mixing different data sources."
"It needs an easier printing feature."
"It needs the ability to drill down more. Analyzing data with Lumira at times becomes a bit difficult."
"Lumira uses a lot of memory resources, so the execution of dashboards is slow."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"There's no additional charge for a Development environment license, so build an additional development server."
"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."
"We purchase licenses through Epic. So, we get an Epic price as opposed to the SAP price. If we were going to use other products like Webby that they offer or exclusively use BI Launch Pad, it would cost a lot because half of our employees would touch it in some fashion. So, we use Epic-Crystal integration to keep the licensing cost down. I believe the BI Launch Pad licensing is something like $800 for each, and the Crystal Report licensing is something like $500 for each, but that's not what we pay."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"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.​"
"It is not cost-effective. It is expensive."
"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.
893,164 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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Construction Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise68
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, Apache and others in Data Visualization. Updated: April 2026.
893,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.