We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI, Oracle OBIEE, and TIBCO Spotfire based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."Key features are its dashboard functionality and ease of integration with various data sources."
"I like how the Query Editor lets me manipulate the data, and the available visuals are good. You can do everything using the UI."
"You can learn a lot of things quickly using resources like ChatGPT or Microsoft's own solutions, which are very helpful within the Microsoft ecosystem."
"If you are not very technical this tool could be very useful."
"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."
"The solution is very intuitive, you do not need to have too much programming knowledge to use it. Advanced Excel users can use it very easily."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"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."
"The solution has great reporting and forecasting capabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ease of use."
"The performance can issue queries to work in the Oracle database in Oracle's native language. There are a lot of visualizations which suit our business."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the openness of the solution. It helps us integrate some of our clients."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to run it in Exalytics within memory coupled to a Repository on Exadata is where it flies. So it's not meant for mom and pop shops, but if you are a global 500 fortune 1000 company, this is a tool that can get you what you need on time and even in real time."
"It provides excellent stability."
"The dashboard and analysis are the most valuable features of this solution."
"It’s stable and straightforward."
"From a scalability standpoint, I would say it's pretty fantastic."
"Data discovery is very simple."
"The out-of-the-box features are simple and easy to use across the board."
"The most valuable feature is the map visuals that help us connect to the geo-specialized data which is more advanced than other solutions."
"We particularly like the data angling feature of this solution. This gives us the ability to work on data transformations, join files, and carry out other data preparation tasks all in a single tool."
"The ability to connect to many different data sources is one of the key features. The other would then be the different ways in which that data can be visualized."
"The ability to create a real-time data mark, using just one piece of software, is the best feature of this product."
"The visual outlet or the visualization aspect can be improved because the settings piece is quite problematic. It requires a lot of time to set the visuals and check. It is quite fiddly to change all the settings and font sizes. It just needs better ability in terms of using templates or visualization templates to get the vision. Our users always benchmark based on the product, and they don't appreciate everything under the bonnet. The only rating is based on the actual reports in the settings for the dashboard. They should make it look a bit funky and a bit more aesthetically pleasing on the eye. It is quite a fiddly tool, but other than that, it is pretty slick. Because it is community-driven, the marketplace tends to be changing forever. You get the standard visualizations, and you've also got all other marketplace visualizations that require you to spend a bit more money and purchase things in the marketplace. With certain visualizations, there is no longevity. I had used certain visualizations, but they discontinued them, and I had to rebuild my reports, which is obviously very frustrating. There should be some sort of stabilization around how the marketplace visuals impact the users when they expire."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
"I believe the price should be degressive, and we should have a lower, or better unit price if we have more users."
"It should have more integrations."
"You need to purchase upgraded support separately."
"SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is not user friendly."
"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."
"I would like them to provide a license that just allows us to see dashboards. What I don't like about this solution is that in order to just watch a dashboard, you need a license. Currently, you need to purchase a full license of Power BI Pro just to see something, which is not attractive. If you have a license, you can see a shared dashboard, but you can also build a dashboard or you can collaborate with other people. However, if you only want to see a dashboard, there is no license for that. I only want to see the dashboard, and I don't want to do anything more than watching the information on the dashboard. There is no license that allows you to see a shared dashboard. This is one of the areas of opportunity because I would like a lot of people to be able to see a shared dashboard, not to interact with it or to collaborate online with it. I would like to see more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources. Given the fact that everything is related to Microsoft Azure and all services available on Microsoft Azure, I see that they're building more connections to Microsoft Azure services instead of other non-Microsoft services. I understand the strategy, but it would be good to have more compatibility with non-Microsoft data sources."
"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."
"Oracle OBIEEE's performance and licensing costs could be improved."
"It needs a better security management system."
"They should develop greater visualization because their visualization isn't industry leading at the moment. The way you pull the data and see the data compared to other platforms, they're lagging a little bit behind. Also, their cost. I've got Oracle account managers trying to persuade me every day to purchase these licenses. Once you purchase OBIEE, then you have to purchase the virtualization and then you have to purchase the mobile license to operate on the mobile. It's really expensive."
"We needed some technical expertise during setup."
"In the on-premises version, the feature for connecting and selecting the data between the databases looks a bit cumbersome, but I am not sure. The person who is using it takes a lot of time to design a data warehouse. When I ask him why is it taking this long, I get a response that this is something that he has to design, and there are different tools that are available. He has to write the ETL and design the warehouse according to the customer's requirement, which takes a lot of time. Its visualization should be enhanced, and there should be a feature where you can easily create your custom data warehouse."
"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."
"It should have more self-service capabilities."
"We would like an easier way to get the product to the cloud. Right now, we have the on-premise version, and we would like to find a way to make it easier to migrate it over to the cloud."
"I would like more easy-to-implement analytical algorithms. At the moment they include things like forecasts and regressions. They need to add a lot more of these types of things to the product because not everyone is a data scientist."
"The number of charts available out of the box in Spotfire can be enhanced."
"The Text Area feature needs to be more user-friendly. It is a little clunky to use, and it is difficult to consistently format text."
"The initial setup can be difficult."
"We encountered difficulties connecting the special data sets, as the post data set did not contain any shared columns, making it difficult to establish a connection between the data sets."
"The initial setup is complicated and needs experience and knowledge."
"Print capability and trigger-based events."
