We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI, Oracle Essbase, and Oracle OBIEE based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."We found the initial setup to be straightforward."
"The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI."
"Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."
"It is really flexible. The charts and reports are really nice. You have the flexibility of self-service."
"The most valuable feature would be the abundance of connectors. It is also easy to use."
"The sharing features are vital, especially the ability to share and test different shared dashboards."
"Allows business users with a mission to solve their own problems, without an IT person."
"As it was my first time using Power BI, I can say that it was fairly easy to learn, especially if you already know BI-type tools."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"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."
"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"Inter Process Communication."
"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 mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"The visualization is very good."
"Provides good data visualization features, and provides a lot of visualization reports from various data sources."
"I think the most valuable features are the ability to drill down, the graphs, and the scheduling for the reports to be received in Excel on a daily basis. Users like Excel, so it's good for them that they receive the reports by email, that they don't have to specify the schedule."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports."
"Compared to other applications, like Tableau, Microsoft BI doesn't have as many functions that allow you to do more in-depth analysis and represent the findings."
"Microsoft Power BI can be confusing, because it has two languages that you need to learn if you want to use it, and this makes it more difficult for nontechnical users."
"Microsoft should offer additional features for visualization and have additional features for slicing and dicing that data."
"Areas of Power BI that could be improved are the learning curve for developers who come from non-technical backgrounds."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"The data source definition is all over the place."
"here are still better UI designs they can go through. I'm assuming they are focusing more on capabilities rather than look-and-feel designs."
"The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features."
"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"The performance could be better."
"The graphical capabilities could be better. They are also cumbersome, and they are limited compared to Tableau, Power BI, or even Business Objects to a certain extent and Cognos. The error logging isn't great either. The errors that come out when you schedule aren't easy to understand. I find how they filter within a query quite cumbersome and difficult to debug if somebody else has done it. You can see as you build, and I think that's where the problem is. It doesn't lend itself to debug something. For example, if you create a formula that's quite complicated, it's not easy to understand what goes with what. It becomes spaghetti, and it's very difficult to unpick. That's really my gripe about it, and in some ways, it's too flexible. It tries to be a Jack of all trades when it's not. I think a lot of these products, if they concentrate on trying to produce your reports, then that's fine. But when they're trying to do all sorts of other things as well, then it isn't very easy. We get lots of support from Oracle, but I think the problem is that we get many invalid file operations. Nobody understands why. It can be a multitude of reasons, but no one reason could cause it. That's just one of the issues we've had in the last year. But the scope of reporting has gone through the roof over the previous 12 to 18 months. We want an end-of-life OBIEE in our environment because some of the infrastructure runs unclustered. We weren't allowed to go clustered for some reason, and we never knew why. Unfortunately, going down that route means that the platform we run it on, WebLogic, has now become non-standard within our organization. Everything's been moved off it and onto other platforms. Unfortunately, our OBIEE runs on that platform, and we're being pushed down different routes, and we don't know where we're going at the moment. Within the next two years, I don't think we'll have OBIEE in our part of the business. In the next release, I think having the capability of being able to develop and then promote to a production environment rather than having to have separate environments will help. I know that Tableau and Power BI can be created on a desktop application, and then when it's ready to go live, you can promote it."
"There are a lot of aspects of Oracle OBIEE that are exceptionally complicated, make things unnecessarily difficult for everyone who uses it. In terms of the integrations, Oracle needs to improve a little more, but I believe that they have tried to capture all those issues. The issues we are facing in the Oracle OBIEE 12C versions, in the Oracle Analytical Server Center or Analytical Cloud versions, Oracle has managed to overcome the challenges."
"Managing the OB applications requires a high level of experience, and makes the solution quite heavy."
"I would like to see the data wrangling features enhanced."
"Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier."
"For a beginner, this is a product that is difficult to learn. You cannot learn it quickly."
"The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options."
