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Oracle Essbase vs Oracle OBIEE 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Essbase
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (11th)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th), Reporting (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Oracle Essbase and Oracle OBIEE aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Oracle Essbase is designed for Database Development and Management and holds a mindshare of 0.9%, down 1.1% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 3.5% mindshare, down 4.5% since last year.
Database Development and Management
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Bhavya N - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Ashok Bhadra - PeerSpot reviewer
Though comprehensive, it is expensive
The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a very comprehensive tool. Oracle OBIEE is a really robust tool for a very large enterprise implementation. Its features in terms of physical data model to logical data model building are all really robust. Though somebody else had developed the tool for the client for whom I used the tool, it was very well done. The data modeling was very well done, and it depends on the person who is executing it, as I hadn't developed it. I had just enhanced it. I had seen whatever my role was, but somebody had initially developed it. It was developed very well. It has a fantastic feature of documenting. When you work with many clients, you see the documentation is always missing, and you end up taking up some other vendor's job. It is usually very hard to figure out technically what was done, what was not done, and where the data is, so the data dictionaries are not up to date, and information documentation is always very poor. Oracle OBIEE has a built-in feature where you can actually create entire documentation of all the data elements and how they are linked, and it throws out HTML documents that are all interlinked, so if you have an entire directory structure, it helps create the document. You can find out which logical model links to which physical table, and it is very easy to identify. There are multiple combinations if you want to identify one particular table and how many models are involved. You just need to click a hyperlink click, and it gives you all the information. If somebody has made any enhancements, you can just regenerate the document as there is a component of the tool that generates the documentation automatically, which is brilliant, I think.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"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. This allows you to do a pretty sophisticated analysis so that you can drill into it and slice and dice the data."
"It helps us fetch specific data sets per users' requirements."
"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."
"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."
"Essbase is a kind of backbone, or back end, for systems like Hyperion Planning."
"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."
"The solution is scalable."
"It provides excellent stability."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"We can see almost-real-time performance in our operations. When there is a problem, it is easy to escalate it to top management and the time for management to make a decision about it is much shorter than it would be using a manual process."
"Oracle OBIEE is a scary and stable product since it is a strong and well-created tool... In short, the solution is stable since it works properly every day."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly set of tools that the customer can use to develop their own business dashboards."
"Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...The solution's initial setup was straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Oracle OBIEE are the ease of logging in, the dashboard, and showing the problems in the data. Additionally, the reports are well integrated and it has good technology."
"The dashboard and analysis are the most valuable features of this solution."
 

Cons

"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"The reporting tool of Essbase needs improvement."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"There is room for improvement in terms of cost-effectiveness."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"Essbase has a programming language, and it has a couple of functions to do forecasting, however, their feature set for that is not that good."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"It could be more user-friendly. For example, the RPD layer could be more straightforward. From a user's point of view, the visualization, especially the graphs, are not as attractive when compared to other tools like QlikView and Qlik Sense."
"From an improvement perspective, the technical team should be able to provide more accurate answers by taking into consideration the context of the issues faced by users."
"Oracle OBIEE could improve by having better integration and compatibility with other vendors."
"One significant improvement is the need for simplification. The set up could be more intuitive. An enterprise setup with HA and DR are pretty complex and to get a robust solution one has to play around with Real Application Cluster data sources and FAN notifications as well as WebLogic clustering and external load balancers. SSO also is not that simple to set up especially if you want all your Oracle systems to use the same SSO solution, i.e., no cheating with direct LDAP connectivity."
"One feature I would definitely like to see is the ability to provide the in-memory data. Oracle might have some plugins but, as of now, that feature isn't available out-of-the-box. You might have to purchase that feature."
"If the data is large, the dashboard takes a really long time. So, based on the database, if you have around a million cost contacts, the load time is very low, and the dashboard fails."
"The development effort takes longer than other BI tools currently on the market."
"The pricing of the solution should be bettered."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"It is a costly solution."
"Essbase is competitively priced."
"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."
"The licensing cost is based on the number of users using it."
"For the license in part of Oracle, my company makes yearly payments."
"I think to spread this across an enterprise will be a significant investment."
"Compared with the other products in the market, I feel Oracle OBIEE is an expensive product."
"Its licensing is yearly."
"The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details."
"Pricing is an area that could be improved."
"Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Financial Services Firm
22%
Computer Software Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Essbase?
It's not that expensive, but also not cheap. I'm not sure because it's a private license.
What needs improvement with Oracle Essbase?
Improvements for Oracle Essbase could be made, as there are many tools available now, such as FCCS, TRCS, and ERCS. I find managing the database difficult, especially regarding optimization and dat...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?
I have been using Oracle Essbase for the last thirteen years and I am into this space for thirty years. I am working on the sales-based platform where I work with different clients for GE, Thomson ...
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 fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
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 assist customers. These are two attributes that make this system quite valuable. OB...
What do you like most about Oracle OBIEE?
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.
 

Also Known As

Essbase
OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

CHU de Rennes, Bellco Credit Union, Akindo Sushiro Co. Ltd, Deutsche Telekom AG, Samarco MineraÊo 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.
Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.
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