Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle OBIEE comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2022
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos
Sponsored
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
6th
Ranking in Reporting
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
132
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Microsoft Power BI
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
1st
Ranking in Reporting
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
302
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Oracle OBIEE
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
5th
Ranking in Reporting
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of IBM Cognos is 3.2%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Power BI is 24.4%, up from 23.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle OBIEE is 2.9%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
Unique Categories:
Reporting
3.1%
 

Q&A Highlights

NC
Nov 08, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

MK
Sep 13, 2021
A comprehensive and user-friendly solution for business intelligence
The comprehensiveness or broadness of the software functions or business intelligence functions that it provides is valuable. It is also quite easy to use and user-friendly I would like them to reinclude PowerPlay. One thing that I am missing in the current Cognos is what was formally named…
Alaa T Alhorani - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 25, 2022
Affordable, supports various languages, and allows you to do whatever you want
Most of the dashboarding tools have prebuilt graphs. So, you have to stick with them, unless you are going to use a third-party tool to create them, and then you are going to upload them to the BI tool. In Power BI, they started supporting this functionality and created a tool for that, but it isn't yet complete and mature. It is still exceeding the expectations and is better than most of the BI tools when it comes to creating custom graphs, but it needs more enhancement and simplification. It would be good to have a design tool provided by Power BI to design the graphs that we want and set the figures that we want on them.
VG
Nov 10, 2021
Poor performance and difficult installation, but the price is reasonable
We were disappointed with Oracle OBIEE, because of the performance. In terms of an analytical tool, it is quite outdated. End-users want to receive results quickly and to be able to view millions of rows of data in a matter of seconds. OBIEE was unable of doing so because of the way it was modeled and developed. It requires it to go to the database, run the SQL, and then fetch the result for each query. That procedure took a long time to complete. There are a variety of different in-memory tools available; the data is loaded into the server's RAM or memory, and all requests, including data requests, are served from the RAM, making it extremely fast. If you look at Qlik Sense or Tableau, or perhaps some other products on the market, such as Power BI, you'll notice that they have all of the data in RAM. The performance and the complex setup are the main reason for switching to Qlik Sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has a very powerful edit feature which allows users to back out of changes (undo) without forcing them to recreate entire reports."
"Using custom controls, it is possible to extend the application with even more functionality and make the application intuitive and attractive."
"The Report Studio that is aimed at professional report writers."
"It is a stable product."
"The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report."
"IBM Cognos is an excellent solution for tax, planning, budgeting, profit and loss statements and balance sheets."
"The most valuable feature is developing reports from different data sources, making it a reliable data source."
"Comparing IBM Cognos to other applications, once a person is trained on it or they have developed a skill set to operate the application, it is best in its category."
"Our setup is very straight forward and can be done in a matter of hours."
"The most valuable feature is shareability, where we can publish work to the cloud and share it with team members."
"I also find connecting to different data sources is quite simple. Other solutions we were using before were complicated."
"It is a pretty straightforward and flexible solution for data integration and modeling. It is a low-code solution. When you are doing data integration, you can use the GUI, which is very simple and straightforward. You can also do very intricate custom queries and model it at different levels. It is very easy to use and scalable."
"It ingegrates nicely with Office 365."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"I like the flexibility it offers."
"The visualization and reporting are the most valuable features of this solution."
"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."
"It has helped to consolidate data and report on a single version of the truth."
"The most valuable features of Oracle OBIEE are the ease of logging in, the dashboard, and showing the problems in the data. Additionally, the reports are well integrated and it has good technology."
"Dashboards provide us with various views and perspectives on our data, allowing us to analyze metrics such as revenue, occupancy rates, etc."
"Its robustness is most valuable. It can handle massive amounts of data quickly. If it's properly configured and tuned, it can handle massive amounts of data very quickly to produce results. That to me is the number one feature."
"It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the security of the solution."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...The solution's initial setup was straightforward."
 

Cons

"There are many problems with the product's stability part, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Tableau and Power BI are faster than Cognos."
"There are some problems with how Cognos handles huge data sets and when connecting with multiple sources and searching the data."
"Need improvement towards Visualization."
"It could have more options for themes."
"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."
"The solution's support could be better."
"They should provide improved visual reporting."
"Microsoft BI's visualization could be better. Though Power BI's visualization has steadily improved over the years, it's not on the level tools like Tableau and SAS or some of the more expensive products on the market."
"The solution could improve by having more attractive graphical charts."
"Right now, their premium pricing is keeping us out of the premium market. The premium price per user just doesn't make sense for us, but we haven't reached the limit of 500 users to justify the premium."
"The look is simple, and could be a little more professional."
"This solution's performance when handling big data could be improved. Right now, if you're handling big data, the application becomes slow and the performance is very low."
"I have been doing trial and error to figuring out how to do the data analyzing and modeling. There could be some improvement to simplify it."
"Microsoft has got a very large repository of all change suggestions which have been raised by the BI community. They keep on adding features that are very widely sought after by the community. We don't focus on product features. We focus on business requirements. To use the solution, we find that existing features are good enough and offer us a very effective solution."
"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case."
"The solution is too expensive for small firms."
"Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map."
"An area for improvement is that Oracle pushes more users to Oracle BI Publisher rather than emphasizing Oracle OBIEE for reporting. The pricing for Oracle OBIEE could be improved."
"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."
"The platform's data visualization features need improvement."
"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."
"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. For example, we designed the OBIEE repository and deployed it into the server, and we are now accessing and creating a report. For some reason, if the report is not working as expected, it is very difficult to identify the issue. We have a feature to see the physical query that is being generated in the central OBIEE server. I feel that this feature should have been available at the repository level so that while designing the repository, we can select the presentation columns and the query it is going to create. This will avoid the additional task of deploying a feature into the server and then testing the report. It will also make the implementation process friendly if, while designing the repository, we can see: How is a feature working? Are any of the presentation columns selected? How is the query being generated? Which query is being generated? Are any joints used? What kind of joints are used? Having this kind of information will make Oracle OBIEE more powerful and developer-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is my understanding that the cost is very low. It's not very expensive."
"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."
"It's more expensive than similar solutions like Tableau and Power BI."
"It is pretty expensive."
"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."
"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."
"IBM Cognos offers competitive pricing similar to other BI vendors in the market."
"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."
"Its licensing cost is very high. It is $20 per user, which is very high, but it is a good product, so you pay for it."
"Microsoft BI is very cost-effective and this is why we use it."
"Power BI is subscription-based, and you have three options. The Pro edition, which is the standard one, is about $9 per user. The Premium edition, which provides AI and cloud capabilities but at a limited size, is for small to medium enterprises. It is about $20 per user. For large enterprises, such as manufacturing facilities, there is an option for the capacity. The capacity subscription is about $4,000 per capacity level. They also have an option for the on-premises version, but it is not common to see someone going for the on-premises version. The on-premises version requires a specific license that is attached to SQL Server. I believe it is about $17,000, but I'm not sure about it."
"Remove the cost of a licence to show a dashboard within SharePoint. Why should readers of a dashboard have to pay to view? ​"
"Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
"Power BI is cost-effective compared to other reporting tools."
"In the beginning, the solution cost approximately $1,000 per month, we have a Microsoft startup subscription. There is a subscription pack for startups company which we are able to have for one year."
"We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person."
"It's expensive."
"It is high."
"I think to spread this across an enterprise will be a significant investment."
"Oracle products are extremely expensive."
"It is an expensive solution."
"I would rate it a 4 out of 5 in terms of pricing."
"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."
"It's comparable to the current technology we're using, Qlik Sense."
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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…
 

Answers from the Community

NC
Nov 8, 2021
Nov 8, 2021
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 OBIEE offers user security, data security, and many other security options. OBIEE also has a machine learning option, which is very good. OBIEE works best for very large organizations. Microsoft BI is...
See 2 answers
Oct 24, 2021
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 OBIEE offers user security, data security, and many other security options. OBIEE also has a machine learning option, which is very good. OBIEE works best for very large organizations. Microsoft BI is easy to learn, very user-friendly and stable, and integrates well with everything in the Microsoft ecosystem. This solution offers many different licensing options and the technical support is very good. It is a very good solution for teaching and training and works great integrating with Excel. Oracle OBIEE implementation and deployment can be confusing, requiring technical expertise and experience to manage. The pricing model is expensive and it is not a cost-effective solution for smaller enterprises. There also seems to be a lot of redundancy with regard to creating the necessary code to make things run smoothly. This solution should be more intuitive and less complex. Scalability could also be easier. With Microsoft BI, design and visualization seems a bit limited. They should offer better licensing options with more flexibility for various unique client needs, especially with smaller enterprises. Moving to the cloud makes licensing needs even more challenging to figure out and to choose the best option. Support could be better in explaining how issues were resolved and what steps were taken to resolve them. Conclusion Oracle OBIEE is very user-friendly and offers customizable dashboards. The visualization is very good and they offer AI with good forecasting options and machine learning. This is a great solution for large-scale enterprises. Microsoft BI is a good option for smaller-scale enterprises and, of course, works great with everything within the Microsoft ecosystem. It is a great option for the less tech-savvy user.
MR
Nov 8, 2021
When comparing Power BI with OBIEE, it is evident that OBIEE emerges as the winner in the data management aspect, while Power BI scores drastically above OBIEE in the self-service and data visualization aspects.  Power BI and OBIEE make a strong pair in the Analytics landscape by complementing the weaknesses of one with the strengths of the other! Therefore, it is good to leverage the best of both OBIEE and Power BI, by connecting them seamlessly and securely through BI Connector.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
60%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Government
4%
Educational Organization
38%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Seeking lightweight open source BI software
It depends on the Data architecture and the complexity of your requirement. Some great tools in the market are Qlik ...
What do you like most about IBM Cognos?
The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.
What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?
The tool does not have much documentation on the internet. It is not easy to resolve issues by finding the reason for...
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 wou...
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 info...
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 ...
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 ass...
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 f...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle OBIEE?
Licensing costs for Oracle OBIEE can be higher, and maintenance charges may also be significant.
 

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.
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
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 Microsoft Power BI vs. Oracle OBIEE and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.