This is a question that has been bothering me the last year. I don’t really have a straight answer but I do have some thoughts on this that I would like to share in this blog.
My answer to the question, which is the best BI tool to use, SAC or Power BI would be: ‘Probably PowerBI’.
The reasons for this are:
- It is easier to start and get access to the tool: users probably already have a PowerBI license through their office subscription, and they can work with the offline version on their laptop. With SAC they will always need to work in the cloud, and they will need to do an effort to obtain a license.
- There is a huge PowerBI community for support and answering questions. The SAP community is smaller and is held back by the bad platform design that was installed several years ago.
- There are plenty of features in PowerBI to make good looking reports.
With PowerBI, there will be several business users who will be able to make great reports that will help them in their work.
Of course, for businesses that rely heavily on SAP software, SAC will always be a serious option to consider. Personally, I think that SAC will always be a tool that will be used by SAP BI consultants to make high quality, single version of the truth, reports for the business. Reports that make up together a BI application. The reason for this is that the learning curve of SAC is pretty steep, and is more easily learned by SAP consultants, who will be able to make full use of its potential.
SAC will have its unique selling point once this BI application building has reached the same level as SAP Lumira Designer.
SAP is working towards that, but they are still not there. In the meantime, SAP customers should not bother too much with replacing their current SAP BI solution with SAC. The business users will be more interested in working with PowerBI. But in the long run SAC will catch up, and then it will be the main trusted source of BI information.
To conclude: Probably for now best to use PowerBI, SAC will be the better choice for SAP businesses in the long run.
