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."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."
"The reports are most valuable. If it is a single-source universe, based on only one database, the performance, and the reporting tool is user-friendly, and users are very familiar with the tool and are comfortable using it."
"If I were to compare it with Power BI and I wanted to build proper well-formatted reports, BusinessObjects Business Intelligence does that much better. Power BI is just getting into that space. They've concentrated more on visualization, which is what the SAP Lumira does. With Web Intelligence, you are able to build reports that users can interact with. They can also do a lot of querying themselves. It is robust in terms of security and integration. It is also quite scalable."
"It has got great flexibility. As a reporting tool, it has a great deal of flexibility for numerous data resources that you can bring into it. It allows you to write your SQL query directly within the product. So, it allows you to do server-side joins instead of pulling all the data into Crystal Report to aggregate that data. It has great visualization. For the most part, it operates quite efficiently."
"The report development tool called SAP Web Intelligence under the BI Launch Pad portal has been the most valuable feature."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"The ability to merge dimensions in a report is great."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is definitely scalable."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pros →
"It provides supporting data for critical policy and operational changes"
"The ability to deploy is the added ability to centralise the Tableau repository for all Tableau Developers."
"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."
"Since Tableau is on the cloud, we haven't faced any challenges around scalability."
"Although Tableau isn't the best for us when it comes to processing and working on live data, it is very good at extracting data for analysis."
"The ease of presenting findings is very helpful."
"From my perspective, it enables clients to better understand our data and make better decisions based on that information."
"Tableau is an advanced specialized tool. One of the best features I've seen is the lack of an intermediate semantic layer. I think that's an advantage compared to any other tool like BusinessObjects or Power BI, which are Tableau's biggest competitors."
"It could be a lighter solution."
"It is not simple to use."
"This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"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."
"I really want SAP to focus on the dashboarding side. Based on what I have seen in the past 10 years, dashboarding has captured a lot of markets. Executives at the top-level want data that is summarized, looks good, and tells you a story. That's where Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI have an upper edge. It doesn't mean SAP doesn't give you dashboarding. They do have a dashboarding solution, but Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are more intuitive and more attractive. I would like SAP to capture the dashboarding market as well, wherein they give at least some competition to other competitors. Presently, Tableau, Qlik, and Power BI are leading the market."
"Currently, we can use Explore to do data discovering, but cannot generate charts."
"The combination of Lumira along with Design Studio merger last year still needs development from a visualization standpoint."
"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."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Cons →
"The pricing is a bit higher than the competition. They'll need to lower it to stay competitive."
"From the developer perspective, the data connection handling the target data set is what most needs to be improved."
"They need a write-back; that is what is missing. If they get the write back to the database, they will be fully automated, but for the time being, they are not."
"It is not so great when it comes to data exchange/integration, data mining, etc."
"Provide additional enhancements in any business process: Operations, Marketing and Sales, Finance, Human Resources, Logistics, etc."
"The extraction, transformation and loading of data in Tableau takes a lot of time and we do not have confidence that Tableau is showing all the data we need."
"When we put more information on a single screen, it gets compressed and superimposed in many places while scrolling."
"We would like a report model, because currently there is no schema that we can create in the tool."
More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is ranked 6th in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 102 reviews while Tableau is ranked 2nd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 292 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.
See our list of best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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.