We performed a comparison between Looker and Oracle OBIEE based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Tableau, Qlik, MicroStrategy and others in Embedded BI."From a developer's perspective, the way the functionality's being handled is great."
"It is a pretty stable solution because it is a cloud-based product."
"The product is easy to use."
"It's quite effortless to navigate through various applications and review their updated data in real-time."
"With Looker, I have experienced benefits in terms of usability and shareability."
"Looker allows you to generate the most optimal SQL queries in a DC through UI actions. We had signed a contract with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. That was the primary reason we adopted Looker. It works better with BigQuery than any other BI platform. We also like how this tool was developed. It was designed with an eye toward microservices architecture."
"We can centralize all our data models."
"The stability of Looker has been good since I have been using it. However, it depends on what components are being used."
"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is the security of the solution."
"It has helped to consolidate data and report on a single version of the truth."
"It's easy to use for business analysts."
"The most valuable feature is the openness of the solution. It helps us integrate some of our clients."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The solution offers a wide range of software tools to meet various needs, such as those concerning reports, developer solutions like APEX and the integration of data."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the various scenarios the product offers and its stability."
"The setup isn't too difficult."
"Looker doesn't connect to Excel, which is a huge disappointment because a lot of data is presented in Excel. Also, it can't consume data directly from REST APIs, which is necessary. Looker needs to expand its horizons when it comes to data sources. The inability to connect to different data sources is hampering our use cases. Currently, it only has an ODBC connection that connects to a database. It needs to connect to other data sources, such as Excel, APIs, and different platforms."
"The product does not have documented material."
"Stability needs improvement."
"The visualization capability of the product is limited."
"The main area of concern in Looker is probably related to blending the data from the different sources, including the data present internally in the company and on the cloud."
"The integration with different databases must be improved."
"It needs to be more user-friendly."
"Integrations with other BI tools could be better."
"They should develop greater visualization because their visualization isn't industry leading at the moment. The way you pull the data and see the data compared to other platforms, they're lagging a little bit behind. Also, their cost. I've got Oracle account managers trying to persuade me every day to purchase these licenses. Once you purchase OBIEE, then you have to purchase the virtualization and then you have to purchase the mobile license to operate on the mobile. It's really expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Oracle OBIEE can improve the ease of use. It is a lot to learn and it could be made easier."
"An area for improvement is that Oracle pushes more users to Oracle BI Publisher rather than emphasizing Oracle OBIEE for reporting. The pricing for Oracle OBIEE could be improved."
"Oracle OBIEE only displays KPIs, but it does not include strategic objectives or display risk in a strategic map."
"Oracle OBIEE could improve by having better integration and compatibility with other vendors."
"There should be more integration in the solution. For example, there should be one solution with multiple functionalities so that other solutions are not needed. Having one solution with all the needed functionality would be helpful."
Looker is ranked 5th in Embedded BI with 19 reviews while Oracle OBIEE is ranked 3rd in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 154 reviews. Looker is rated 8.0, while Oracle OBIEE is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Looker writes "The APIs are exposed at every level, so it's highly modular". 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". Looker is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, Google Data Studio, Databricks and MicroStrategy, whereas Oracle OBIEE is most compared with Microsoft Power BI, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, IBM Cognos, Tableau and QlikView.
We monitor all Embedded BI 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.
