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Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer vs Oracle OBIEE vs Tableau Enterprise 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle OBIEE is 3.2%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau Enterprise is 15.1%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tableau Enterprise15.1%
Oracle OBIEE3.2%
Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer1.2%
Other80.5%
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Useful for business reports and helps to drill down accounting information
The tool's most valuable feature is table creation. One of the most important capabilities is the supplier assessment reports. These reports provide a balance during transactions, which is crucial for auditing. This feature is not standard in other ERP systems, making it highly valuable. The solution helps to drill down details from sources like payables and inventory, which the accounting department requires.
AA
Analyst at Equifax Inc.
Unified semantic layer has driven informed credit risk decisions and real-time analytical insight
Performance-related issues are a concern, as in multiple reports I have seen, some reports were poorly performing. We can focus on implementation of performance so that reports are delivered within seconds. The user interface and self-service experience can be improved through modernization of the UI, addressing self-service limitations, and integrating with mobile. Technical and administrative complexities can also be addressed. Complexities such as system configuration require attention. In the initial setup of Oracle OBIEE, there are multiple things starting from infrastructure provisioning, database schemas, and WebLogic server installations. However, the RPD, the semantic layer, is the steepest hurdle. Security integration, integrating with LDAP or Active Directory, is rarely plug and play and requires deep knowledge of WebLogic. Deep knowledge is necessary when starting with the initial setup of Oracle OBIEE. Other dependencies include Java middleware and client tools. Since Oracle OBIEE deals with huge data, report performance is the biggest concern. The out-of-the-box setup is rarely optimized, so we need to manually check configuration files, such as nqsconfig.ini file settings. For recommendations in Oracle OBIEE, from what I have seen, we work with star schemas in the RPD. I always aim for the star schema in the business model, even if the physical source is normalized. This approach will impact the performance, speed of the data, and accuracy. Oracle OBIEE could improve to allow other schemas as well. Performance is a major area for improvement, and they should work on aggregating the persistence and improve the persistence wizard where we implement aggregations. Caching features have been given, including event polling tables where we can do purging and seeding, but the main focus should be with respect to schema designs.
Uzair Faruqi - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of Data Science at Mjunction Services
Ease of developing dashboards and receiving strong technical support have enabled efficient data visualization
Introducing custom features, such as NLP-based reports, is not very good in Tableau. My MD has been asking us for a way to write in natural language to request reports that the system should generate, but that isn't very effective with Tableau. As a developer, I can develop an on-demand report in Python quite easily, but exposing a REST API on the Tableau platform is not a very easy task. AI enablement is an area for improvement for Tableau, and that is something they might have to work upon. I have heard that ThoughtSpot is quite better in this regard, but the cost of ThoughtSpot is much higher. ThoughtSpot has lots of natural language-based report generation features that Tableau lacks.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The tool's most valuable feature is table creation. One of the most important capabilities is the supplier assessment reports. These reports provide a balance during transactions, which is crucial for auditing."
"Discoverer has been very stable and we've had no real issues."
"It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."
"The best feature of the Virtual C, of course, is data visualization."
"Several KPI reports and different analytical reports can be generated for the operations team."
"They were reasonable in terms of price."
"We have scheduled reports delivered automatically to our business users using enterprise features."
"The data modeling tier (called repository in Oracle BI technology) lets the user build and manage flexible, stable solutions for a large number of data sources, and business reporting areas."
"I think having the conformed structures makes it a lot easier for end users and pulling reports together."
"It's easy to create fully-functional Dashboards."
"Geo Spatial maps and Time Series animation with Storyboarding, and the easy to use interface, have really accelerated adoption."
"Before we built a data platform using Tableau we were unable to align our employees around their data."
"Self-service is most valuable. Users can pick up quickly and do the resolution. There are a lot of out-of-the-box features, and it satisfies most of the needs. If users are properly trained, they can deal with any situation."
"The primary use case of this solution is for the BI daily usage and all of the KPI for analysis."
"The data visualization piece is most valuable. We do ad-hoc analysis or one-time shot things, but there are things that we have to track every single day. When our management and our customers want to see how things are changing, the dashboarding provides that information. Tableau is key in providing that data on a refresh basis. We use a data blending tool that pumps the data into Tableau, and we just schedule it to run every single day. So, the automation of the data and being able to present it to people who are interested are the most valuable features."
"Overall, I am satisfied with Tableau."
"Tableau has comprehensive, insightful charts, which allow you to build stunning dashboards and enrich your support decision-making."
"This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."
 

Cons

"They need to try to develop reports to tie different tables together. Currently, to pull the data into one nice, neat report takes a more advanced technically minded person to develop."
"Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer needs to improve its performance and HTML reports."
"We were disappointed with Oracle OBIEE, because of the performance."
"It takes a lot of maintenance to support the architecture, which is something that should be improved."
"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."
"There is very little within the repository administration tool to guide you on how to achieve complex tasks and the documentation is quite brief."
"The web services are pretty weak. There are so many bugs in it and it doesn’t support that many features."
"Interacting with other non-Oracle applications and sources is a little difficult right now."
"The OBIEE tool can only be used in enterprise-level companies; it is not suitable for small and medium-sized companies because of the cost and the complexity that requires a technical team to install it and develop the reports."
"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."
"When I've done presentations in the past, I've had issues with uploading the cartography."
"Add calculated columns in the edit text box like in Spotfire."
"They must have a write-back solution. You must have the ability to write back into the database, otherwise, it prevents full automation."
"Improvements can be made in template support. The workbook file structure is really hard to version control."
"The data entered into Tableau must be clean. Otherwise, it won't work properly."
"If the price was cheaper, then my rating could have been a perfect 10 ;)"
"It would like to see autosaving, embedded fonts and other options to improve the ease of dashboard layout."
"They need to make it more flexible for enterprise administration, e.g, more job scheduling flexibility, more robust permission control, and more comprehensive mapping service that is native and not dependent on a third party like Mapbox."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is more expensive than its alternatives. You need to pay additional costs for implementation."
"The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details."
"This is a very costly product."
"There are no additional costs, but there might be some charges for the Java feature."
"I would rate it a 4 out of 5 in terms of pricing."
"The company had twenty-five Oracle OBIEE licenses and never expanded. Price-wise, the solution is expensive."
"All products from Oracle are very pricey."
"Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs."
"Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing."
"The licensing model of Tableau has changed since we initially purchased it three years ago and it is more complicated, and I have found it to be more expensive. They have lost market shares to Microsoft BI. My company will probably change solutions this year because of the increased pricing model."
"Best advice on pricing is to anticipate the desire for more licenses once the results of this product are acknowledged in other parts of your company."
"The price of Tableau is high, although there are different types of licenses available."
"Tableau is not as cost-effective as Microsoft BI."
"Its price is a concern. It is more expensive than Power BI. My guess would be that it is $1000 or less per year. We might go for Power BI in the future because of its umbrella with Microsoft licensing. It is much cheaper for us to use Power BI, and some folks will go in that direction because they don't want to pay the higher license."
"It is more expensive than other solutions."
"The product's price is relatively inexpensive and manageable for enterprise-level companies."
"The company chose to purchase a creator license for me, which was $70. With that license, you can also be an administrator. We also have 20-25 extra licenses and they cost around $20-$35 each. Those are for normal users who will be viewing the dashboards. Those are monthly charges."
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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
No data available
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business40
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise103
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business117
Midsize Enterprise67
Large Enterprise184
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer?
Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is more expensive than its alternatives. You need to pay additional costs for...
What needs improvement with Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer?
Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer needs to improve its performance and HTML reports.
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle OBIEE?
Oracle OBIEE is quite expensive, especially when compared to Microsoft's solutions.
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 ...
Tableau vs. Business Objects - Which is a better solution for visualization and analysis?
Both tools have their positives and negatives. First, I should mention that I am relatively new to Tableau. I have be...
Which would you choose - Tableau or SAP Analytics Cloud?
Tableau is easy to set up and maintain. In about a day it is possible for the entire platform to be deployed for use....
 

Also Known As

No data available
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server, Tableau Online
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Georg Fischer Central Plastics
Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.
Accenture, Adobe, Amazon.com, Bank of America, Charles Schwab Corp, Citigroup, Coca-Cola Company, Cornell University, Dell, Deloitte, Duke University, eBay, Exxon Mobil, Fannie Mae, Ferrari, French Red Cross, Goldman Sachs, Google, Government of Canada, HP, Intel, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Macy's, Merck, The New York Times, PayPal, Pfizer, US Army, US Air Force, Skype, and Walmart.
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