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Oracle Essbase vs Oracle OBIEE comparison

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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
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
4.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (17th)
Oracle OBIEE
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (17th), Reporting (12th)
 

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 1.6%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
Oracle OBIEE, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 2.1% mindshare, down 2.4% since last year.
Database Development and Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle Essbase1.6%
Oracle Enterprise Manager4.3%
Oracle Coherence3.8%
Other90.3%
Database Development and Management
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Oracle OBIEE2.1%
Microsoft Power BI7.6%
Tableau Enterprise6.3%
Other84.0%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Bhavya N - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Essbase is a multidimensional database (MOLAP) is undoubtedly leading in that space."
"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"Oracle Essbase enables organizations to take their strategic decisions, which helps them make the right decisions at the right time."
"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."
"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."
"With Oracle Essbase, everything is centralized in a comprehensive financial statement analysis, allowing for complete management of budget, actuals analysis, and forecast."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"We've had a situation where we had data residing in different databases and we wanted to have a robust reporting solution for one of our verticals, OBIEE helped us in achieving that and we were able to build a solution around it which is now widely used throughout the organization."
"In terms of features, everything is good. It is also stable and scalable."
"It has given clients visibility into their operations from a holistic viewpoint."
"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."
"It has helped to consolidate data and report on a single version of the truth."
"Oracle OBIEE is good for data visualization and analytical reporting."
"We basically are able to do better analytics, be able to make better decisions."
"Several KPI reports and different analytical reports can be generated for the operations team."
 

Cons

"They should improve the solution's performance."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"I would like to improve calculations by optimizing performance and reducing processing time."
"I find managing the database difficult, especially regarding optimization and data storage with the huge volume of data."
"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."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"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 include the financial consolidation module that is available in EPM."
"The technical support for EPM is bad. I don't remember anytime that the service support helped me in something."
"We have some stability issues. We periodically refresh the data from the Oracle EBS to OBIEE, and sometimes you can’t see the data and we have to run ad hoc reports to push us through that confusion."
"The quality of Oracle tech support depends: if you get a good person, it's very good; otherwise, it's very bad."
"The performance could improve and in a future release, they could provide more virtualization options."
"The technical support is not as good as before. They used to have very good support five to six years ago, but the support is now hectic and takes too much time to resolve issues."
"The visualizations and usability aspects in this product can be improved a lot."
"Customer service/technical support gets five out of 10. Sometimes good, sometimes bad."
"Make sure they understand the true use of it. Originally, we were shown the dashboard, all the great features that come with OBIEE and OBIA, but we weren't truly told what it takes to maintain it, what it takes to get valuable data for our company out of it."
"A seasoned report writer would want the capability to over-ride the default query system to write complicated queries that can then be fired against the database to run more efficiently. Currently the tool does not have this ability."
 

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."
"For the license in part of Oracle, my company makes yearly payments."
"Its licensing is yearly."
"The pricing we negotiated with Oracle. But, I do not have details."
"The cost of this solution is a little bit high compared with other products like Zoho, so reducing it would make OBIEE more competitive."
"All products from Oracle are very pricey."
"It's expensive."
"This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company."
"It is high."
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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
Financial Services Firm
15%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise14
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business41
Midsize Enterprise34
Large Enterprise105
 

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...
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 ...
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...
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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle OBIEE?
Oracle OBIEE is quite expensive, especially when compared to Microsoft's solutions.
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Quest Software, Oracle, SolarWinds and others in Database Development and Management. Updated: August 2026.
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