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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 (11th), Reporting (9th)
 

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 1.4% mindshare, down 3.7% since last year.
Embedded BI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Looker6.4%
Tableau Enterprise19.1%
Qlik Sense10.4%
Other64.1%
Embedded BI
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Oracle OBIEE1.4%
Microsoft Power BI9.4%
Tableau Enterprise6.7%
Other82.5%
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

"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. I didn't face any issues with stability."
"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's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"The product is easy to use."
"From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"Oracle OBIEE allows for automation, saving time, with estimates suggesting it saves about twenty-five percent of time previously spent on manual tasks."
"It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly set of tools that the customer can use to develop their own business dashboards."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the various scenarios the product offers and its stability."
"Inter Process Communication."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"I like the cloud deployment feature. There are about 20 new features, and they are available on mobile and more. I haven't used any of them, but these features are highly attractive."
 

Cons

"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"The product does not have documented material."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Stability needs improvement."
"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 visualization capability of the product is limited."
"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."
"Oracle OBIEE is lagging in data visualization."
"Retail, Finance, Wholesale"
"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."
"BI Server"
"The complexity of this product means that you need to have a technical team to develop the reports, although this is also true for products like Microsoft BI and Zoho."
"This solution is weak in the data science perspective. I have past data science experience. And, I find that there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of incorporating more advanced statistical modeling into the product."
"The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options."
"From the point of view of strategic management, I would like to have a feature, perhaps a form after we get to the KPI dashboard, to be used to note if something unusual happens in the operations. That way we could record extreme KPI situations, and track why a number is very low or too high."
 

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's not cheap, but it's not expensive for big companies."
"It is cheap."
"I do not have to make any payments to use the solution."
"Looker is expensive and could be made better by reducing it."
"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."
"I think to spread this across an enterprise will be a significant investment."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Compared with the other products in the market, I feel Oracle OBIEE is an expensive product."
"For the license in part of Oracle, my company makes yearly payments."
"In our organization, we use a user-based license for Oracle OBIEE, and I've heard that the license cost is based on the number of users."
"This is a very costly product."
"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."
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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
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
8%
Media Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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

What do you like most about Looker?
With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Looker?
I do not have to make any payments to use the solution. In the beginning, Looker may work fine for its users. If advanced users who have experience with BI tools use Looker, then they may find it t...
What needs improvement with Looker?
The visualization capability of the product is limited. From an improvement perspective, the product should have more visualization capability. I can't clean data in Looker, and if I try to do it, ...
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.
880,511 professionals have used our research since 2012.