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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

"Discoverer has been very stable and we've had no real issues."
"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."
"It has unified the reporting within the group, so now everyone can look at the same picture at the same time."
"Three categorization layers gives us a lot of flexibility, which I didn't realize was possible on other reporting tools."
"It can be used with any type of data models, such as relational lines and dimensional lines."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ability to handle large volumes of data and provide traditional BI functionalities that developers can easily understand."
"The solution is offered as a PaaS - a platform as a service."
"Our company loves the benefits of this solution and has used it for a long time."
"In 2006, we bought Oracle BI, eliminated all those different reports and were able to create a single source of truth."
"The most valuable feature is the openness of the solution, as it helps us integrate some of our clients."
"Partner support is very good."
"We use Tableau dashboards in Tableau Server connected to our ERP system in our weekly executive sales meetings, and the almost real-time data allows a better decision-making process while also helping us identify data quality and cleansing related issues."
"While using this solution I have found the valuable features to be ease of use and the visualization."
"It has a shallow learning curve and so you can go to market very, very, very quickly."
"The ability of filtering and segmentation of the data makes it very flexible compared to other tools."
"It most valuable feature is its ease of developing visualizations, not just charts and graphs."
"It's very easy to set everything up."
"You can create many different types of visualizations and charts, ranging from simple to highly advanced, and if you're doing advanced analytics, you can leverage Tableau by integrating it with other solutions."
 

Cons

"Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer needs to improve its performance and HTML reports."
"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."
"If you are using it for a small to mid-sized company, OBIEE doesn't make much sense."
"One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers."
"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."
"This product is not easy to use and there is a steep learning curve."
"Stability-wise, they still have a lot to improve, especially when you have a lot of data coming out of SQL. For example, if I have to see a million requests, most of the time it crashes."
"This product does not provide value for money."
"Customers are expecting many out of box things, which, currently, OBIEE doesn't support."
"I have encountered certain performance issues which have required us to play around with and streamline the data. The performance could be better."
"Improvements in schema security and row/column security need to be made."
"The SQL programming functionality needs to be improved."
"I would like to see improvement in licensing. It is expensive to provide licenses beyond the 10 we already have."
"Technical support needs improvement. The response time is very poor."
"We did have issues with Tableau 10.1 server with the brokers failing on heavy load but since moving to 10.2, then to 10.3, this issue seems to have been resolved and the environment is now quite stable."
"The user story model is the most deceptive part of Tableau. It is a big marketing option, however, the reality is that it is not enough."
"It needs to allow for more complexity in data joins and creation."
"I would like them to include the Italian language, even if it's not a problem for me to use English, because the Quantrix modeler is only in English."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer is more expensive than its alternatives. You need to pay additional costs for implementation."
"The company had twenty-five Oracle OBIEE licenses and never expanded. Price-wise, the solution is expensive."
"Oracle products are extremely expensive."
"Be prepared to spend a lot of time and money."
"Simplifying the data integration process would save our clients considerable costs."
"This is a very costly product."
"It is high."
"It is an expensive solution."
"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."
"The solution's licensing is based on user-basis. It depends on the business ROI it offers. It's not on the higher side or too cheap; it falls in the medium-cost range. The price is determined by user usage, so the cost will also increase as the number of users increases."
"This license is on a yearly basis."
"The solution is very expensive. If you have many users then it is going to cost your company a lot of money."
"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."
"If they want to be competitive in the market, the price must be improved."
"Its licensing cost should be improved."
"We are paying an annual licensing fee."
"For the use and the capability of the software, it's $70 per month, and that is quite inexpensive."
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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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, IBM and others in Reporting. Updated: March 2026.
886,426 professionals have used our research since 2012.