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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs Yellowfin comparison

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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...
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
5th
Ranking in Data Visualization
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
114
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Yellowfin
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
35th
Ranking in Data Visualization
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (24th), Embedded BI (16th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is 2.9%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Yellowfin is 1.1%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence2.9%
Yellowfin1.1%
Other96.0%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

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.
AC
‎IS Executive at SAINS
It is a central source of up-to-date data and information, but needs more charting capabilities
Management information Reporting Statistics Data analysis It reduces sending copies of different report/spreadsheet versions over email, which makes it difficult to access the right report. It is also able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout.  All management…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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 is solid and stable."
"It gets people off Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and sharing the same reports/dashboards, so departments receive the same figures for KPIs and company performance."
"This reporting and broadcasting solution has a lot of flexibilities and can connect to multiple source systems."
"The level of stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches."
"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."
"It's the best product in the market when it comes to reporting technology."
"We want to use HANA and something called SLT, which will cover our replication and allows us to do modeling directly in the cloud, which is a great feature."
"It is a central source of up-to-date data and information."
"It reduces time to reproduce reports, provides easy access to organisational data, and has the ability to generate a wide range of reports and analysis."
"It is able to create information dashboards for various users' throughout."
"Yellowfin doesn’t try to do everything – it is a BI presentation and communication tool, and it does it brilliantly."
 

Cons

"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools."
"If the business case is for dynamic reports/dashboards, I don't recommend it."
"The performance could be improved, like when we extract a large amount of data."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform can be improved in that the user interface needs much improvement, as not everyone has a complete understanding of the components."
"But SAP sort of dropped the ball with their 4.x release, leaving out features that we had become used to with 3.1, which was stable."
"There are too many steps, and they take too much time."
"While I recommend the SAP Analytics Cloud version, I do not recommend the on-premises version."
"The user interface should be easier to use and navigate."
"It needs more presentation/charting capabilities and integration with GIS."
"The first release was a bit buggy, but they seem to have gotten on top of that very quickly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is fair."
"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."
"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."
"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"The platform's pricing needs to be revised."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
Information not available
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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
11%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
18%
Educational Organization
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business34
Midsize Enterprise20
Large Enterprise67
No data available
 

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
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
NCS, Universitat Konstanz, AT&T, PG&E, SingTel, InternetStores
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence vs. Yellowfin and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.