Oracle Essbase vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence comparison

The compared Oracle and SAP solutions aren't in the same category. Oracle is ranked #12 in DDM , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 1.4% mindshare in the category. SAP is ranked #5 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Oracle users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of SAP users who would recommend it.

Oracle Essbase

Read 18 Oracle Essbase reviews

2,795 Views
755 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Read 114 SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence reviews

11,850 Views
8,295 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Oracle Essbase

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Oracle Essbase and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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

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

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

July 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 (12th)

SAP BusinessObjects Busines...

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

114

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (5th), Data Visualization (4th)

Mindshare comparison

Oracle Essbase and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Oracle Essbase is designed for Database Development and Management and holds a mindshare of 1.4%, up 0.9% compared to last year.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 2.7% mindshare, down 3.8% since last year.

Database Development and Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Oracle Essbase	1.4%
Oracle Enterprise Manager	4.1%
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials	4.1%
Other	90.4%

Database Development and Management

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence	2.7%
Microsoft Power BI	7.7%
Tableau Enterprise	6.2%
Other	83.4%

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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TarunKumar7

Senior Data Engineer at LTI LATAM and Toubro Improtech

Data insights have driven faster financial forecasts and improved role-based decision making

The best features SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform offers include cross-enterprise sharing, where sharing insights is easier and seamless across my organization, and creating role-based dashboards. The role-based dashboards help my team and organization by providing information to specific users, allowing them to make decisions more easily, anytime, anywhere, across any device. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to perform financial reporting to make decisions faster. Since we started using SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, we have been able to make faster, data-driven business decisions based on actual data insights and data analysis, which has accelerated our ability to make better decisions for our business productivity.

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

"The solution is quite scalable, which is the most useful aspect for us."

"The solution is scalable."

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

"With Oracle Essbase, everything is centralized in a comprehensive financial statement analysis, allowing for complete management of budget, actuals analysis, and forecast."

"It's a very powerful analytical engine with Essbase as the back end. We can analyze, transform, or utilize a big chunk of data for our calculations."

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

"Essbase is a powerful tool that continues to provide value for companies."

"Oracle's capability to define custom hierarchies and dimensions has helped my organization in performing nuanced data exploration and advanced modeling because we use Oracle Essbase for dimension definition and also to define the properties of these members, such as dynamic members, stored members, shared members."

More Oracle Essbase pros

"It's provided us with best practice reports out of the box for various modules, as well as an interface for creating adhoc reports with more analytical capabilities."

"It includes valuable features like a dashboard, reporting, visualization, etc."

"The most valuable feature we have found to be the SAP BW, which is a warehouse tool. Additionally, it is an easy tool to use."

"What I find most valuable is that you can run the reports anytime and you can receive the report at a scheduled time."

"The Dynamic HTML (DHTML) client option of Webi has been enhanced adding features that were previously only available with the Java client including conditional formatting and support of XLS as a data provider."

"We are using SAP BusinessObjects because its scheduling capabilities are more powerful than those of other tools."

"It is a very good product, stable, and has good technical capabilities."

"It's a reliable, stable, secure, and mature tool for business intelligence and other functions, like standard reports."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pros

Cons

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

"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."

"The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool."

"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."

"The licensing costs are too high."

"I would like to improve calculations by optimizing performance and reducing processing time."

"It's not a very scalable solution."

"The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support helped me in something."

More Oracle Essbase cons

"Yes, sometimes the services didn't work well, generating a decreasing of performance."

"Over the years, the product tends to rename and rebrand itself and change its direction. This is a deficit of the solution."

"The platform's pricing needs improvement."

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform should be made easier for the end-users and the performance could be improved."

"The self-service area, or dashboard, needs some improvement. While the reporting itself is great, the dashboard and Analytics Cloud are not user friendly."

"The stability is again dependent on your sizing activity. If you don't have enough hardware and use it a lot, the tool will crash."

"They could reduce the licensing expenses. There is nothing really wrong with the product in terms of what it does. It works well. If you are a part of BI Launch Pad, then you could run ad hoc reporting, but for the integration, you need access to BI Launch Pad, which is quite expensive. We're an organization with 18,000 employees. It is not really practical to give people access to BI Launch Pad. So, from a customer perspective, in terms of saturating our employee base, we don't really have great saturation because of the expense."

"They need to improve the processing of software as it has lag when it initially starts."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a costly solution."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"Essbase is competitively priced."

"There is an annual license to use SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform."

"We are satisfied with the solution, but we are not satisfied with the licensing cost which SAP offers. They offer one lumpsum licensing which does everything. That is not the right strategy, because sometimes you don't have power users, they are only viewers, but we need to buy the full license for them. This is not something we want to continue with."

"I have always found SAP BI to be expensive. It is expensive even when you compare SAP BI Cloud with Microsoft Power BI. Power BI is probably around $9.99 per month, and the cheapest SAP BI is around $20, which is double. In terms of price, Power BI is definitely a lot better. If you have budget issues, you may want to go for Power BI."

"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."

"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."

"Depending on your size, try to stick with SAP BusinessObjects BI Edge. Most people tend to overthink the licensing. Remember that one concurrent user means that one person can be performing a task at a given time. That does not mean that only one user can be on the system at a time, it means that only one person can be refreshing a report or designing a dashboard. There are tons of ways you can access your data or reports without consuming a license. I've seen cases where five concurrent licenses support thousands of users."

"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."

"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user6663

BI Expert at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

May 25, 2013

SAP Business Objects vs. Microsoft BI

A quick look at the whole idea on another weblogs gives you a sense that all of them just talked about very brief things like report refresh feature in BO or cube feature in MS Analysis Service. I choose MS BI and I want to share my reasons and opinions on why I choose it and give you another quick…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Construction Company

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Construction Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

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	34
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	67

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...

See all answers

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

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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

SAP BTP is an expensive solution.

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 8% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 6% of the time

Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs Oracle Essbase

Compared 3% of the time

More Oracle Essbase Competitors

SAP Business Data Cloud vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 21% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle OBIEE vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 4% of the time

IBM Cognos vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

Compared 3% of the time

More SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Oracle Essbase

July 2026

Download Oracle Essbase product report

Buyer's Guide

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence

July 2026

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence report

Download SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence product report

Also Known As

Essbase

SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards, SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio

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

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform offers powerful tools for enterprise reporting and data visualization, enhancing strategic decision-making through robust integration and secure analytics capabilities.

Designed for comprehensive enterprise reporting, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform integrates seamlessly with SAP ERP, supporting organizations in creating detailed financial, operational, and academic reports. The platform allows data manipulation across multiple sources using a semantic layer and provides intuitive tools like Web Intelligence and Lumira for user-driven report creation. It features centralized management, versatile connectors, and supports large-scale data analytics critical for business forecasting.

What are the key features of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?

Integration Capabilities: Seamless connection with SAP ERP and various data sources.
Dynamic Scheduling: Automate report generation for timely insights.
Robust Security: Protects data with stringent security measures.
Semantic Layer: Simplifies data manipulation across sources.
Intuitive Tools: Facilitates user-driven report creation with Web Intelligence and Lumira.

What benefits should be considered in reviews?

Comprehensive Reporting: Enables detailed and accurate enterprise reports.
Decision-Making Support: Enhances strategic decisions with reliable data.
Scalability: Efficiently manages large-scale and complex data analytics.
Versatility in Analysis: Offers flexibility for ad hoc analysis and KPI monitoring.

Organizations across sectors like healthcare, education, insurance, and retail leverage SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform for its capability in facilitating detailed reports and integrating dashboards for key performance indicators. Its extensive reporting features support in-depth analytics vital for business prediction and decision-making processes.

SAP

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.

SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.

Buyer's Guide

Database Development and Management

July 2026

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