Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Essbase comparison

The compared Microsoft and Oracle solutions aren't in the same category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 14.1% mindshare in the category. Oracle is ranked #9 in DDM , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 0.8% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Oracle users who would recommend it.
Microsoft Power BI
Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews
  • 22,361 Views
  • 13,864 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
Oracle Essbase
Read 18 Oracle Essbase reviews
  • 1,702 Views
  • 170 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report
Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and Oracle Essbase based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE REPORT
To learn more, read our detailed BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Report (Updated: October 2025).
Buyer's Guide
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
October 2025
Download the complete report
Helped 872,706 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Power BI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
326
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)
Oracle Essbase
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Microsoft Power BI and Oracle Essbase aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Microsoft Power BI is designed for BI (Business Intelligence) Tools and holds a mindshare of 14.1%, down 21.7% compared to last year.
Oracle Essbase, on the other hand, focuses on Database Development and Management, holds 0.8% mindshare, down 1.2% since last year.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI14.1%
Tableau Enterprise10.3%
Amazon QuickSight4.9%
Other70.7%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Database Development and Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Oracle Essbase0.8%
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer6.4%
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials5.9%
Other86.9%
Database Development and Management
 

Featured Reviews

Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.
Read full review
Bhavya N - PeerSpot reviewer
Ensuring efficient data analysis and reporting while identifying areas for calculation and export improvements
The features of Oracle Essbase are valuable, such as its multi-dimensional database used for dynamic calculations and reporting purposes. These features are valuable because they support multi-dimensional data views, allowing users to analyze relationships across various data categories and establish a comprehensive perspective on business operations. Moreover, dynamic calculations allow real-time data analysis, significantly improving the accuracy and depth of financial insights. I have utilized Essbase's data aggregation capabilities. The Oracle Essbase interface provides a good user experience, allowing users to easily navigate and analyze data with fast query performance, effective data visualization tools such as charts, graphs, and tables, and flexibility for customizable analysis and reporting, including the ability to create ad hoc reports. The benefits of the interface include improving productivity and enhancing decision-making.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The best features of Microsoft Power BI include its integration with other Microsoft products and its ability to connect applications within the Microsoft ecosystem."
"SSRS and the Tabular server/Vertipaq engine/DAX are probably the two most valuable components."
"The most valuable feature of Power BI is its ability to provide customized visualizations and insights tailored to specific business needs."
"The most interesting feature of Microsoft Power BI is that it's very user-friendly."
"Data integration is very useful in Power BI. It lets me collect data from many sources. For example, I can get data from Oracle databases and SQL Server databases at the same time."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."
"One of the key benefits of Power BI is how easy it is to develop reports."
More Microsoft Power BI pros
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"Unlike relational, where you're linking together multiple tables, with Essbase, you basically define what the dimensions are beforehand, and you define the hierarchy, and then load the data. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"It's a very powerful analytical engine with Essbase as the back end. We can analyze, transform, or utilize a big chunk of data for our calculations."
"Essbase is a kind of backbone, or back end, for systems like Hyperion Planning."
"Oracle's capability to define custom hierarchies and dimensions has helped my organization in performing nuanced data exploration and advanced modeling because we use Oracle Essbase for dimension definition and also to define the properties of these members, such as dynamic members, stored members, shared members."
"The solution is scalable."
More Oracle Essbase pros
 

Cons

"It is definitely a wonderful analytics tool. However, database ETL, data integration functionality would be absolutely perfect in many cases. Currently, it doesn't get the job done and we need to extract, transform, and load the data from faulty data sets into something more suitable for the deployment of the analytics tool."
"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."
"It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake."
"It needs an AI which can choose the appropriate connection strings and provide options for connections."
"The UI is the main improvement that could be made. Specifically, there is something called DAX, in Power BI, which is complicated compared to calculated fields used in Tableau."
"The DAX in Microsoft BI is quite difficult."
"We haven't used it that long and I haven't come across anything that's stood out as needing to be fixed."
"Microsoft needs to provide more drivers to connect other data sources in a native way."
More Microsoft Power BI cons
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool."
"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
More Oracle Essbase cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Power BI's price is reasonable, especially if you can put it in some bigger package and use it with other products. The value of a solution doesn't just come from its features as a standalone product. The price should also reflect how easy it's to set up, clean data, and integrate with other solutions."
"I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView."
"We are end-users, and we don't take care of the prices and accounting. We get a product and pay the fee to our internal service provider, but its price should be reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bought it."
"I believe that the price is reasonable, at least for an enterprise solution."
"Microsoft BI is considered to be competitively priced when compared to other similar solutions in the market."
"Setup is easy, and the cost is economical. You do sometimes need to pay additional costs for third party products which "plug-in" to Microsoft BI."
"The solution is priced well for what they offer. However, the premium version is very expensive."
"They are charging us by users in storage, and there is a license fee. My financial people handle all that. The client has already worked out a contract with Microsoft, and basically, we're getting government prices."
More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice
"It is a costly solution."
"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."
"Essbase is competitively priced."
"The solution is expensive."
report
See which vendors are best for you
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.
See recommendations
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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…
Read full review
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
9%
Insurance Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business134
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise165
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise14
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
See all answers
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...
See all answers
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 ...
See all answers
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Essbase?
It's not that expensive, but also not cheap. I'm not sure because it's a private license.
See all answers
What needs improvement with Oracle Essbase?
A significant area for improvement in Oracle Essbase is that financial statement analysis, CAPEX and OPEX analysis, and financial consolidation must be done manually, as Oracle Essbase doesn't incl...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?
The initial setup of Oracle Essbase is dependent on whether you select BSO or ASO cubes. First, you need to set up the type of information and once the type of cubes is defined, you need to define ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 14% of the time
Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 11% of the time
Domo vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Domo vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 7% of the time
Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 6% of the time
KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 4% of the time
More Microsoft Power BI Competitors
SAP Analytics Cloud vs Oracle Essbase Logo
SAP Analytics Cloud vs Oracle Essbase
Compared 12% of the time
IBM Planning Analytics vs Oracle Essbase Logo
IBM Planning Analytics vs Oracle Essbase
Compared 9% of the time
IBM Cognos vs Oracle Essbase Logo
IBM Cognos vs Oracle Essbase
Compared 9% of the time
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Oracle Essbase Logo
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Oracle Essbase
Compared 8% of the time
Tableau Enterprise vs Oracle Essbase Logo
Tableau Enterprise vs Oracle Essbase
Compared 6% of the time
More Oracle Essbase Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Power BI
October 2025
Microsoft Power BI reportDownload Microsoft Power BI product report
Buyer's Guide
Oracle Essbase
October 2025
Oracle Essbase reportDownload Oracle Essbase product report
 

Also Known As

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
Essbase
 

Overview

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

Oracle Essbase is an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Server that provides an environment for deploying pre-packaged applications or developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications.

Oracle
 

Sample Customers

Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
CHU de Rennes, Bellco Credit Union, Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samarco MineraÊo S.A., PCCW Ltd., QDQ media S.A.U., Boiron Italia, Specialized Bicycle Components Inc., Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd., Air Canada, Daelim Industrial Co. Ltd.
Buyer's Guide
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
October 2025
Download Free Report
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: October 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
872,706 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.