We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and Oracle OBIEE based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Microsoft BI is the clear winner in this comparison. It is easy to set up, has good customer support, and is reliable and easy to use. In addition, it has an impressive ROI and is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE.
"I have found the quick reporting and the conductivity with all the data sources valuable."
"The querying capabilities are the most valuable because they allow me to build many automations. We have many workflows and many databases that we work on a daily basis. They need to be updated quite quickly. In order to not to take much of our time doing these updates manually, I have set up these automations using the systems. The process is just to ingest the data and reprocess it. Every time I click a button, everything is updated in almost real time. It is by far the easiest system not only for querying but also for data modeling, data visualization, and deployment. It is light years ahead of Tableau and even Microsoft Excel to do these kinds of things. It is very easy to use and set up, and it has a lot of videos on the internet."
"There is a lot of variety in Power BI. In particular, the visuals are quite rich and the feature set has been growing rapidly in the last two years. Possibly the best part for me is that there are a lot of ways to connect with data sources."
"What's most valuable in this tool is that it gives its users detailed error messages. It's a very stable data analytics tool, and it offers good scalability."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"The fact that you can visualize items is great."
"Easy to use. End-users can make changes to the graphics."
"I've seen no issues with BI's stability."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is it's designed for Oracle. It works well in the Oracle environment and can sit on top of any application."
"Oracle OBIEE is good for data visualization and analytical reporting."
"Inter Process Communication."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ease of use."
"I like the cloud deployment feature. There are about 20 new features, and they are available on mobile and more. I haven't used any of them, but these features are highly attractive."
"Can utilize SQL queries to generate reports directly."
"The most valuable feature is the openness of the solution. It helps us integrate some of our clients."
"These licenses are in US dollars. With a long-term license, the client is unaffected when the exchange rate goes up. However, if the exchange rate goes down, you don't get refunded from the excess money you've paid. I guess that is a risk you take in business."
"When it comes to improvement, I would say there could be more tutorials for students in universities who are just learning it. And it wouldn't have to be just for students in universities. It might also be for the people who use it in the real world."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"They asked you to pay if you want to synchronize more than eight times, you would have to go to a Power BI enterprise license, which is much more costly."
"The only concern I have faced with Microsoft BI is the time it takes to find out an issue and rectify it."
"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."
"Microsoft BI’s integration and visualization could be improved."
"One of the more difficult things to do is to export some of the data from Power BI to Excel."
"BI Server"
"The solution is too expensive for small firms."
"Its overall organization as an analytical tool, the layout of OBIEE, is not very good."
"The drawback with the tool is that though it is well-created, its users are under-trained to use it."
"Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier."
"Setup and migration are very complex. Technically, Oracle accessory is extremely complex. These days, the industry demands a kind of Excel analysis, which is very easy to install, set up, and it's very developer-friendly as well as end-user friendly. OBIEE lacks all those features."
"The pricing of the solution should be bettered."
"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."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in Reporting with 297 reviews while Oracle OBIEE is ranked 3rd in Reporting with 154 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while Oracle OBIEE is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle OBIEE writes "A solution that is easily accessible, scalable and requires a straightforward initial setup process to get started". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and MicroStrategy, whereas Oracle OBIEE is most compared with SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, IBM Cognos, Tableau, Oracle Analytics Cloud and Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. See our Microsoft Power BI vs. Oracle OBIEE report.
See our list of best Reporting vendors and best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools vendors.
We monitor all Reporting reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
When comparing Power BI with OBIEE, it is evident that OBIEE emerges as the winner in the data management aspect, while Power BI scores drastically above OBIEE in the self-service and data visualization aspects.
Power BI and OBIEE make a strong pair in the Analytics landscape by complementing the weaknesses of one with the strengths of the other!
Therefore, it is good to leverage the best of both OBIEE and Power BI, by connecting them seamlessly and securely through BI Connector.