We performed a comparison between SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Way of creating reports."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"The web intelligence reporting tool and universe designer are the most valuable aspects of the solution."
"One of the most valuable features of SAP BusinessObjects is that it's not a dashboarding solution. It's a real product. You can create operational reports and publish it to anyone. You can create schedules. You can create a Universe, semantic layers. There's also a security configuration. It's a huge product, so if there is a business need, SAP BusinessObjects can cover it."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"Business analytics are the most valuable features of this solution; I don't have experience with the other functional features offered."
"The setup is pretty easy. It's not hard at all."
"What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process."
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"This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."
"Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making."
"It's very easy to visualize data with this product. The visualization maps of and frames that we have been able to cross-reference has been excellent."
"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."
"I like the visualization component."
"It is a very stable product. It doesn't break."
"The most valuable feature is the richness of its visualization and from a self-service standpoint, the ease of use."
"Better interaction and less time spent with end users."
"There is still a lot to be done on the mobile side to make Web Intelligence truly seamless between the desktop and mobile versions and I would like to see SAP pay a lot more attention to this."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"Tableau was easier for me to use because the interface is more similar to Excel which I was used to using."
"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."
"Its price should be better. It is expensive and not cost-effective. It should also be improved in terms of end-user experience. It requires further improvements for usability and ease of use. It should have more dashboarding metrics and much faster integration with ERP so that when you double click, you can instantly see the scenario-based result."
"We would like to see a native version of BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence created for the cloud."
"The UI could be updated a bit."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
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"With Tableau, there is a gap in its ability to handle very large-scale data."
"In the next release, I would like to be able to have the option to see more raw data that I'm converting on the dashboard."
"It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc."
"When it comes to visualizations, Tableau has a limitation as compared to Power BI. It has a limited set of visualizations. Power BI has the entire marketplace, so you can connect and import many visualizations and use them, whereas Tableau has only 10 or 15 visualizations. There should be more visualizations, and there should also be data integration with more cloud providers."
"It would be nice if we could export more raw data. Currently, there is a limit as to how much data you can export."
"The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved."
"The customization requires a lot of effort and should be simplified. The performance could be better."
"The price could be better."
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SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 103 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 293 reviews. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is rated 7.8, while Tableau is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform writes "Web intelligence will work with any amount of data even if you have 10 million rows". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tableau writes "Provides fast data access with in-memory extracts, makes it easy to create visualizations, and saves time". SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, IBM Cognos and Oracle Analytics Cloud, whereas Tableau is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, Amazon QuickSight, Domo, SAS Visual Analytics and Databricks. See our SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs. Tableau report.
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Basically and besides for some differences between tools, Business Objects has "direct access" to data allocated on SAP DBs, since SAP storage has its own data structure and even its own indexes and the DBMS are used just as a repository or mapping tool. This means that access to SAP data is not a trivial task.
I don't remember at this moment if Tableau has interface modules with SAP but anyways my advice is: If you are using SAP ERP and technology then you have a big budget for your project and therefore just use the "native" tools that will let you access to SAP easily. If you are playing as a BI Consultant and needs to access SAP at a lower cost try Arcplan instead that have direct SAP connectors. Otherwise if you just need data mining on a regular DW or a set of application tables you should use Tableau, Qlikview or Arcplan -my favorites.
Regards,
Marcelo
Tableau and Business Objects come from two different (although overlapping) segments of the BI space. BO is an enterprise BI platform and Tableau is a data discovery tool.
Tableau doesn’t have a semantic layer comparable to a BO Universe, this is both a strength and a weakness. The user connects directly to the data sources and is exposed to the schemas in their native form. The advantage is that the user can be completely self-sufficient, all they need from IT is data access. And they don’t need to know much about the data before they can start exploring it. Tableau is also very good at data visualization.
We use both Microstrategy and Tableau, the former is comparable to BO. We have a number users who use both tools.
Tableau is a data exploration and visualization tool with an in memory
feature. There is no middle layer like BO (universe). BO is an enterprise
product and so many tools falls under the umbrella. Xcelcius can be
equivalent to Tableau ....
In Tableau you create your own data sources with the help of odbc. Just
like Crystal Reports. The advantage being that Tableau compresses and stores its data internally in a compressed format and through the In memory feature its quite faster.
You can create your own hierarchies on the fly, can do any amount of
analysis on data visualization, drilling is very easy and it's very user
friendly.
As it's a visualization and exploration solution ... You can't have basic styles like
section breaks of BO.
Beginning with version 7.0.4, Tableau supports connecting directly SAP® Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) using the Tableau SAP BW connector. The Tableau SAP BW connector uses the OLE DB for OLAP provider and issues live queries to SAP BW using the MDX query language. One benefit to this type of connection is that you will always connect to the latest data. Additionally, the connection experience is very similar to using Tableau with other OLAP data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Oracle Essbase. Beginning with Tableau 8.1 the Tableau SAP BW connector also supports data connections using extracts. For more information about using SAP BW extracts, see SAP BW Extract limitations.