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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 (10th)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (12th), 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 9.0% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.3% mindshare, down 3.8% since last year.
Embedded BI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Looker6.4%
Tableau Enterprise17.6%
Qlik Sense8.6%
Other67.4%
Embedded BI
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle OBIEE1.3%
Microsoft Power BI9.3%
Tableau Enterprise6.7%
Other82.7%
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.
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

"Empowering every employee to make smarter decisions in less time easily pushes us into the black on ROI."
"With respect to buy solutions, cost is relevant. However, the Looker solution would have outmatched the ongoing multi-million budget spending with respect to cost-efficiency."
"The product is easy to use."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"Looker is an extremely valuable product that can really transform your company's ability to use data to answer challenging questions."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"If one has to deal with large volumes of data, which I categorically could tell is big data and has to create visuals, Looker is the tool to go."
"Several KPI reports and different analytical reports can be generated for the operations team."
"Ability to create our own reports."
"Go ahead it is a very good, stable and reliable product."
"For me, it makes the difference is in terms of our users being able to take advantage of a product which allows you to get access to data, reports, make decisions quickly, and have better insights regarding operations."
"It's easy to use for business analysts."
"Oracle OBIEE allows for automation, saving time, with estimates suggesting it saves about twenty-five percent of time previously spent on manual tasks."
"Our primary use is as an enterprise reporting solution."
"Dashboards provide us with various views and perspectives on our data, allowing us to analyze metrics such as revenue, occupancy rates, etc."
 

Cons

"Stability needs improvement."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel."
"There is a lot of customization that we needed/need to build ourselves. Other BI tools have more out of the box."
"Their needs to be much more control of visualizations to become more on par with Tableau."
"There have a been a few minor bugs, including a security bug that did not affect us."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"This product is useful for non-technical users, who are able to use the interface to easily slice data. But for the admin users who are responsible for maintaining the schemas and files behind the scenes, it can easily become a chore, as there is a lot of manual work involved in defining the schemas of the connected database(s), as well as any refactored tables; the restrictive syntax also makes maintenance difficult."
"The product does not have documented material."
"The technical support is not as good as before. They used to have very good support five to six years ago, but the support is now hectic and takes too much time to resolve issues."
"When evaluating cost, Tableau and Power BI are less costly compared to Oracle OBIEE, which is an important consideration when assessing cost-effectiveness and return on investment."
"In the previous release of the administration tool, there were a lot of issues and compatibility issues that didn't work with OBIEE."
"Visualization of OBIEE needs a boost. The data mashup functionality and ease of use for end users also need to be improved a lot."
"It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market."
"We have some stability issues. We periodically refresh the data from the Oracle EBS to OBIEE, and sometimes you can’t see the data and we have to run ad hoc reports to push us through that confusion."
"One feature I would definitely like to see is the ability to provide the in-memory data. Oracle might have some plugins but, as of now, that feature isn't available out-of-the-box. You might have to purchase that feature."
"Even though we have a feature to enable the physical query to be seen in the log, in case of any issues, it is challenging to debug and see or identify where is the issue."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"It's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"It is cheap."
"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 high."
"Be prepared to spend a lot of time and money."
"Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs."
"A person only needs to pay towards the subscription costs since it is a cloud-based solution. I use the free version of Oracle OBIEE."
"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."
"The cost of this solution is a little bit high compared with other products like Zoho, so reducing it would make OBIEE more competitive."
"The licensing cost for Oracle OBIEE is expensive."
"This is a very costly product."
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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
9%
Media Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
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 Enterprise103
 

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.
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