Oracle Essbase vs Pentaho Business Analytics comparison

Why PeerSpot?

The compared Oracle and Hitachi Vantara solutions aren't in the same category. Oracle is ranked #17 in DDM , with an average rating of 7.3, and holds a 1.6% mindshare in the category. Hitachi Vantara is ranked #19 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.5, and holds a 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Oracle users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Hitachi Vantara users who would recommend it.

Oracle Essbase

Read 18 Oracle Essbase reviews

3,604 Views
1,081 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Pentaho Business Analytics

Read 45 Pentaho Business Analytics reviews

6,141 Views
3,685 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Oracle Essbase

Pentaho Business Analytics

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Oracle Essbase and Pentaho Business Analytics based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Quest Software, Oracle, SolarWinds and others in Database Development and Management.

To learn more, read our detailed Database Development and Management Report (Updated: October 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

October 2026

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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

Oracle Essbase

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

4.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Database Development and Management (17th)

Pentaho Business Analytics

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (19th), Cloud Operations Analytics (2nd), Reporting (15th)

Mindshare comparison

Oracle Essbase and Pentaho Business Analytics aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Oracle Essbase is designed for Database Development and Management and holds a mindshare of 1.6%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
Pentaho Business Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 1.1% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.

Database Development and Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Oracle Essbase	1.6%
Oracle Enterprise Manager	4.3%
Oracle Coherence	3.8%
Other	90.3%

Database Development and Management

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Pentaho Business Analytics	1.1%
Microsoft Power BI	7.6%
Tableau Enterprise	6.3%
Other	85.0%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Bhavya N

Senior System Engineer at Infosys

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.

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Julien Baluka

Founder at SJT Consult

Solution enables effective ETL processes and exhibits high satisfaction

From an integration perspective, Pentaho Business Analytics is not the best tool on the market. There are things done by Apache that are better, though I am not the one implementing them, so this is based on what I have heard about novelties in the market. I do not see the need to extend the coverage of Pentaho Business Analytics's domain. For things that it does not do, there are better solutions on the market, and it would be costly to implement them. Pentaho Business Analytics is a very great tool for very specific standardized scenarios. If you need more complex elastic solutions because the process is different, there are better tools available.

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

"Oracle Essbase enables organizations to take their strategic decisions, which helps them make the right decisions at the right time."

"Essbase is a kind of backbone, or back end, for systems like Hyperion Planning."

"Essbase is extremely stable and low-maintenance."

"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."

"Oracle Essbase is a web integration system that integrates with other data systems."

"Essbase is a multidimensional database (MOLAP) is undoubtedly leading in that space."

"Its multidimensional analysis is great; 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, allowing you to do sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."

"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."

More Oracle Essbase pros

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"Pentaho is based on industry standards to build scalable solutions and it is very simple to scale up, horizontally, and vertically."

"For decision purposes, it serves the information to managers so they can make proper decisions using the data."

"I use Pentaho everyday in my company, creating new BI environments for my customers."

"Pentaho is an analytics platform that can be used when an organization has a lot of big data storage systems already installed and needs to manage and analyze that data. It has a specific use case for unstructured data, such as documents, and needs to be able to search and analyze it."

"Powerful Analytics, Fast KPI Analysis"

"We wanted a tool where by using it we could integrate multiple data sets, and could get responsive reports and Pentaho helped us do this in a good way."

"The data integration feature is the most valuable feature for us."

More Pentaho Business Analytics pros

Cons

"The initial setup is pretty complex."

"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."

"Sometimes, the current program is slow. They may have to consider the storage and the RAM, increasing the speed and performing the queries at a faster speed."

"They should improve the solution's performance."

"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."

"The solution could be cheaper. It is costly, and the initial setup could be simplified."

"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."

"It's not a very scalable solution."

More Oracle Essbase cons

"Mobile responsiveness of BA server should be improved."

"There are too many bugs in our version."

"In the reporting tool, I would like to see what code it generates. As of now, there is no provision to see the underlying code of the PRD file."

"For those that run the open source community edition at times it can be difficult to find updated references for support."

"Version control would be a good addition."

"The OEM license pricing is quite expensive."

"The dashboards and reports could use more improvement to show more data and to provide more analysis."

"Deployment is not simple. It is not simple because we are dealing with a lot of data; we are dealing with a lot of storage. So, it's not a simple process."

More Pentaho Business Analytics cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Essbase is competitively priced."

"It is a costly solution."

"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."

"The solution is expensive."

"Free and commercial versions are available."

"We were lucky enough to find a Pentaho OEM partner who offered a data warehouse model and the ETL software for about 60K SGD per year."

"Pentaho is expensive ."

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Comparison Review

it_user6978

Co-Founder at Helical IT Solution (Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Talend, Kettle, DWBI, ETL, Ctools, iReport, Jasper Report)

Jun 10, 2013

Jaspersoft vs. Pentaho – Which one to use & is there any need to purchase the commercial edition

Any company (be it technology, manfucaturing, human resource, ecommerce, SME etc) always has the need for Business Intelligence to some or the other extent. If cost is one of the consideration factor, then the 2 BI tools which are at the forefront are Pentaho and Jaspersoft. But, often the same…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

15%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Outsourcing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	15

Questions from the Community

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...

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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

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Essbase?

The pricing functionality in Oracle Essbase is handled through the model you develop, where each cube can be customized with members and dimensions for pricing and entities. You can implement any f...

See all answers

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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pentaho Business Analytics?

Pentaho Business Analytics offers the best value for money. While improvements can be made in some areas, particularly with more cloud-based solutions, it is not in their domain because they do not...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pentaho Business Analytics?

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 13% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 9% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 4% of the time

More Oracle Essbase Competitors

Tableau Enterprise vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

Knowage vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 6% of the time

icCube vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs Pentaho Business Analytics

Compared 4% of the time

More Pentaho Business Analytics Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Oracle Essbase

October 2026

Download Oracle Essbase product report

Buyer's Guide

Pentaho Business Analytics

October 2026

Download Pentaho Business Analytics product report

Also Known As

Essbase

Pentaho, Kettle, Hitachi Pentaho Business Analytics

Overview

Oracle Essbase provides robust multi-dimensional analysis with a strong calculation engine and aggregate storage, enabling fast calculations and swift response times for large data volumes.

Essbase offers scalable, stable multi-dimensional analysis capabilities, important for enterprises managing large datasets. Its flexibility and efficiency support detailed reporting, strategic decision-making, and advanced modeling. An intuitive interface allows fast data visualization and dynamic analysis, aiding strategic business operations. Continuous upgrades enhance performance and productivity.

What are the key features of Oracle Essbase?

Multi-dimensional Analysis: Enables complex data insights through powerful analysis capabilities.
Calculation Engine: Provides swift calculations essential for timely decision-making in business environments.
Aggregate Storage: Ensures efficient data handling, supporting fast response times and large data volumes.
Intuitive Interface: Facilitates fast visualization and enhances productivity through easy data management.

What benefits or ROI should users focus on in reviews?

Scalability: Supports growing data needs efficiently, maintaining stability.
Performance Upgrades: Continuously improves data processing speeds and system functionality.
Flexibility: Adapts to diverse reporting and analysis needs effectively.
Enhanced Productivity: Increases organizational efficiency with dynamic data analysis capabilities.

In industries like telecommunications, banking, and healthcare, Essbase is used extensively for financial management, including planning, budgeting, and reporting. It facilitates decision-making in multinational firms by supporting enterprise performance management and generating comprehensive financial statements. Users leverage it for complex data processing and intensive queries, improving operational efficiency.

Oracle

Pentaho Business Analytics, recognized for its powerful ETL capabilities, delivers robust data management and analytics. Its adaptable interface and custom plugins enable effective data transformations, appealing to enterprises seeking efficient data handling and integration.

Pentaho Business Analytics offers a comprehensive suite for data warehousing, ETL processes, and business intelligence. Known for integrating and analyzing data from multiple systems, it supports industries like marketing, automotive, telecom, and insurance. Despite critiques on its interface and Java reliance, its ability to manage both small and complex data loads makes it a cost-effective choice.

What are the key features of Pentaho Business Analytics?

Pentaho Data Integration: Delivers powerful ETL capabilities for seamless data transformations and connectivity.
Custom Plugins: Supports adaptability with diverse data transformation and integration options.
Dashboard Integration: Facilitates effective visualizations and dashboard creation.

What benefits can be expected from Pentaho Business Analytics?

Cost-Effective: Suitable for enterprises handling complex data loads.
Community Support: Driven by an active user community for better troubleshooting.

Pentaho Business Analytics finds application in sectors requiring extensive data storage and management like telecom and insurance. Companies utilize its capabilities for creating ETL pipelines, managing data flows, and enabling data-driven decision-making.

Hitachi Vantara

Sample Customers

CHU de Rennes, Bellco Credit Union, Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samarco MineraÊo 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.

Cargo 2000 Lufthansa, Marketo, ModCloth, Cardiac Science, Telefonica, ExactTarget, Active Broadband Networks, and Brussels Airport.

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

October 2026

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