Dynamics NAV and SAP - Features and Capabilities Comparision

Dynamics NAV and SAP are undoubtedly the most popular ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software solutions available today. Often many business owners are confused which amongst the two is a better ERP solution for them. So, in this post, we will compare these two premier ERP solutions on different parameters to help the readers make a more prudent decision.

•    Global Approach: Dynamics NAV offers 52 localisations and supports 44 languages, compared to the 41 localisations and 28 language support of SAP.

•    Partners: Dynamics NAV has over 10,000 partners worldwide against more than 11,500 partners of SAP.

•    Popularity: Dynamics NAV is being used by over 100,000 companies across the globe, whereas SAP is being used by more than 31,000 companies.

•    Maturity: Dynamics NAV is the revamped version of Navision, which was first released in 1983, whereas SAP is a revamped version of TopManage that was first released in 1996.

•    Licensing: Dynamics NAV offers two types of licenses: Perpetual and Subscription with added flexibility that the subscription licenses can be used for on-premise as well. So, the data can be migrated to and from the cloud as per the requirement. On the other hand, SAP offers separate licenses for on-demand and on-premise requirements, which substantially cuts the flexibility option.

•    User Types: Dynamics NAV allows two types of users: Full users and Limited users. On the other hand, SAP allows 4 types of users: Full users, Limited CRM users, Limited Logistics users, and Limited Financial users.

•    Reporting: Dynamics NAV offers reporting features like SSRS, Direct export to Excel, and Jet Report Express, whereas SAP offer Crystal reports, and HANA (in-memory) reporting features. Both Crystal and SSRS reports allow users to utilize the power of SQL. SAP HANA delivers better performance in data warehousing in-memory while Jet Reports helps in fetching data to Excel, and Direct export to Excel allows the NAV users to work on raw data easily.

•    Support: Dynamics NAV offers mainstream support for 5 years and extended support for 10 years after the release at a onetime maintenance cost of 16% of the license costs. On the other hand, SAP offers only 4 years of support for every release, and its onetime maintenance cost is 16% of the license costs.

•    Office integration: Dynamics NAV being a Microsoft product offers tighter integration with Office, which is also a Microsoft technology. On the other hand, SAP only offers basic MS Office Excel export and Outlook for CRM functionalities to the users. 

•    Instant messaging & Social media: Dynamics NAV offers richer IM and social media features given its Outlook and Yammer integration attributes. However, SAP offers only IM features.

•    Intranet and Publishing: Dynamics NAV offers seamless integration with SharePoint that helps a lot in intranet and publishing; these features are not available in SAP as it does not support SharePoint integration.

•    CRM integration: Dynamics NAV offers tight integrations with its sister product Dynamics CRM; SAP, on the other hand, has a basic CRM integrated with it.