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Looker 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

Looker
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Embedded BI (9th)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (13th), Reporting (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Looker is designed for Embedded BI and holds a mindshare of 6.4%, down 9.1% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.4% mindshare, down 3.9% since last year.
Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Looker6.4%
Tableau Enterprise17.9%
Qlik Sense9.2%
Other66.5%
Embedded BI
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Oracle OBIEE1.4%
Microsoft Power BI8.9%
Tableau Enterprise6.2%
Other83.5%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore Jhunjhunwala - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Analytics Consultant at a outsourcing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
A cloud solution for operational reporting but is expensive
Some basic feature that is available in other reporting tools is missing. Looker has the ability to show more than 5,000 rows for operational reporting. Some reporting tools allow users to scroll down to see more than 5,000 rows, but in Looker, you have to download the entire dataset. Looker should consider adding a scroll-down option to allow users to view large datasets on screen without downloading them. Looker has some options for granting users access as viewers. However, viewers cannot download the entire dataset. Only superusers can download the whole dataset on the Explore screen. This is a big limitation, as you cannot give any user viewer access. You can give access to superuser access, which is a cost to the company.
reviewer2701689 - PeerSpot reviewer
Innovation & Data Management Enterprise Architect at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Facing a complex learning curve challenges, automation capabilities provide some clerical work savings
Oracle OBIEE has a steep learning curve compared to tools like SQL Server or Power BI. In situations where complex problem-solving is required, Oracle's support tends to direct users to sales representatives with limited technical knowledge, which is less than ideal. Additionally, the solution is more expensive than using Microsoft's reporting tools.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"The product is easy to use."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"We can see almost-real-time performance in our operations. When there is a problem, it is easy to escalate it to top management and the time for management to make a decision about it is much shorter than it would be using a manual process."
"It's easy to use for business analysts."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE, for me, would be the Web Catalog. From a development perspective, I do not need any client or any software to be installed on my laptop or desktop. Everything is browser-based, so I just open the browser and start development."
"The security is good. For example, we can implement column-level security."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is it's designed for Oracle. It works well in the Oracle environment and can sit on top of any application."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to run it in Exalytics within memory coupled to a Repository on Exadata is where it flies. So it's not meant for mom and pop shops, but if you are a global 500 fortune 1000 company, this is a tool that can get you what you need on time and even in real time."
"In terms of features, everything is good. It is also stable and scalable."
"Some of the dashboard capabilities are good. The dashboard capabilities that tell you what kind of reports are available and provide you a summary of the reports are valuable. It is easy to navigate and easy to download reports into Excel to utilize them."
 

Cons

"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"One significant improvement is the need for simplification. The set up could be more intuitive. An enterprise setup with HA and DR are pretty complex and to get a robust solution one has to play around with Real Application Cluster data sources and FAN notifications as well as WebLogic clustering and external load balancers. SSO also is not that simple to set up especially if you want all your Oracle systems to use the same SSO solution, i.e., no cheating with direct LDAP connectivity."
"Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map."
"It is complex for designing RPD, and it can be simpler. Their support can also be improved in terms of response time."
"n the beginning it had it's stability issues, but it became stable."
"I would rate its current performance as a five out of ten because a lot of features are missed out in OBIEE."
"Retail, Finance, Wholesale"
"It's not so flexible to do BI reporting directly from the data source without models. It is not that agile."
"The development effort takes longer than other BI tools currently on the market."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Looker usually depends on the solution's provider, but it is usually cheaper than the other products in the market. Looker is offered at different prices for different companies."
"It is cheap."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"It's comparable to the current technology we're using, Qlik Sense."
"The licensing cost for Oracle OBIEE is expensive."
"Be prepared to spend a lot of time and money."
"It is high."
"The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details."
"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."
"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."
"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."
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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
Financial Services Firm
13%
Retailer
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise102
 

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 do you like most about Oracle OBIEE?
The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ability to handle large volumes of data and provide traditional BI functionalities that developers can easily understand.
 

Also Known As

No data available
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Yahoo!, Etsy, Kohler, Hipcamp, Hubspot, Kickstarter, Venmo, Dollar Shave Club, 600+ customer
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 Salesforce, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI. Updated: January 2026.
882,594 professionals have used our research since 2012.