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IBM Watson Explorer vs Oracle OBIEE comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

IBM Watson Explorer
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (9th)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (17th), Reporting (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Watson Explorer is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 3.5%, up 1.5% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.8% mindshare, down 3.5% since last year.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Watson Explorer3.5%
IBM SPSS Statistics15.6%
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
Other65.4%
Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle OBIEE1.8%
Microsoft Power BI7.4%
Tableau Enterprise5.9%
Other84.9%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1319820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
A data analysis tool that is scalable and includes keyword search functionality
The solution is used for a government company for data collection and analysis I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer. I have been using the solution for five…
AA
Analyst at Equifax Inc.
Unified semantic layer has driven informed credit risk decisions and real-time analytical insight
Performance-related issues are a concern, as in multiple reports I have seen, some reports were poorly performing. We can focus on implementation of performance so that reports are delivered within seconds. The user interface and self-service experience can be improved through modernization of the UI, addressing self-service limitations, and integrating with mobile. Technical and administrative complexities can also be addressed. Complexities such as system configuration require attention. In the initial setup of Oracle OBIEE, there are multiple things starting from infrastructure provisioning, database schemas, and WebLogic server installations. However, the RPD, the semantic layer, is the steepest hurdle. Security integration, integrating with LDAP or Active Directory, is rarely plug and play and requires deep knowledge of WebLogic. Deep knowledge is necessary when starting with the initial setup of Oracle OBIEE. Other dependencies include Java middleware and client tools. Since Oracle OBIEE deals with huge data, report performance is the biggest concern. The out-of-the-box setup is rarely optimized, so we need to manually check configuration files, such as nqsconfig.ini file settings. For recommendations in Oracle OBIEE, from what I have seen, we work with star schemas in the RPD. I always aim for the star schema in the business model, even if the physical source is normalized. This approach will impact the performance, speed of the data, and accuracy. Oracle OBIEE could improve to allow other schemas as well. Performance is a major area for improvement, and they should work on aggregating the persistence and improve the persistence wizard where we implement aggregations. Caching features have been given, including event polling tables where we can do purging and seeding, but the main focus should be with respect to schema designs.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and being able to see hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"What impressed me more about Watson is that it is easy to use it, not for the technical people, but for business people."
"The main use case is FAQ for the user; it works for almost 80% of the use case coverage."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"The solution is easy to use and very flexible."
"Having up-to-date, current data for the executives and the managers that make decisions allows them to make more accurate decisions and helps us leverage our business."
"The solution has good data visualization features and provides a lot of visualization reports from various data sources."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...The solution's initial setup was straightforward."
"The centralized metadata model component is most valuable."
"It has helped provide ad hoc reports, which improve the business by doing forecasting as well as analyzing the existing reports with old data."
"Oracle OBIEE is very easy to use. Looking at analytics, I think they have come a long way by adding new features like visualization, which is really cool."
 

Cons

"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary or something of the like."
"The solution is expensive."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"I think we'll get it to a 10, but I think at the moment it's got to be a good eight or nine out of 10 at least."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"I would like to see Machine Learning included in this solution."
"Some of the additional features required are that it should be more user-friendly. Sometimes, when we use the drag-and-drop feature it does not drag the object and needs to be user-friendly."
"Oracle OBIEE could improve by having better integration and compatibility with other vendors."
"Certainly the look and feel of the user interface is something should be improved further."
"There could be better integration with other solutions, such as Microsoft Office."
"Customer service/technical support gets five out of 10. Sometimes good, sometimes bad."
"I think OBIEE is going to go away and I don't see new things to be added to it."
"They should make the dashboard more intuitive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"It is high."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It is reasonable, but it depends on how you're going to use it. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company."
"If you compare Qlik Sense and Oracle OBIEE licensing, then Oracle products are much better. With Qlik Sense, you have to pay per client and per use. But we get Oracle OBIEE along with the Oracle database, making it much more cost-effective in the long term."
"Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs."
"The company had twenty-five Oracle OBIEE licenses and never expanded. Price-wise, the solution is expensive."
"Pricing is an area that could be improved."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Healthcare Company
13%
Performing Arts
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise105
 

Questions from the Community

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How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
Which Oracle product is better - OBIEE or Analytics Cloud?
Oracle OBIEE is designed to be relatively easy to set up and has a helpful customer support staff at the ready to assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle OBIEE?
Oracle OBIEE is quite expensive, especially when compared to Microsoft's solutions.
 

Also Known As

IBM WEX
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Knime, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: August 2026.
910,005 professionals have used our research since 2012.