MicroStrategy vs Oracle OBIEE vs Tableau comparison

MicroStrategy and Oracle are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. MicroStrategy is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.4, while Oracle is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8. MicroStrategy holds a 3.2% mindshare in BIT, compared to Oracle’s 3.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of MicroStrategy users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Oracle users who would recommend it.

MicroStrategy

Read 160 MicroStrategy reviews

4,158 Views
2,716 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Oracle OBIEE

Read 157 Oracle OBIEE reviews

6,707 Views
3,431 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Tableau

Read 303 Tableau reviews

17,456 Views
14,743 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

MicroStrategy

Oracle OBIEE

Tableau

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between MicroStrategy, Oracle OBIEE, and Tableau based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools.

To learn more, read our detailed BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 849,210 peers since 2012

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 2025, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of MicroStrategy is 3.2%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Oracle OBIEE is 3.8%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tableau is 17.5%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

AJIN S L

Technical Analyst at Allianz

Experience has shown effective features for analysis, but needs interface improvements

The most effective features of MicroStrategy for data analysis are those that cater to user needs. However, I find Power BI to be more useful when comparing some features, but my company does not choose Power BI due to certain code restrictions. The MicroStrategy interface is not as good as Power BI, especially concerning the user-friendly aspects.

Read full review

VishnuReddy

Senior Manager at Ernst & Young

Handles large datasets and easy to interact with and handle but performance could be better

Oracle's technical support usually recommends to upgrade when you contact them for support. They don't focus on fixing the issue at hand or providing guidance on how to do it. If you are in a lower environment, like one version down, they will blindly suggest upgrading. Additional patches are given for other Oracle products like WebLogic, databases, and apps. They fix issues and create patches based on client needs. But from an OBIEE point of view, they mostly provide bundle patches of around 5 to 6 GB that need to be applied and tested end-to-end. It's not an easy way to get small patches, and if issues arise after applying the patches, you have to contact Oracle again.

Read full review

Nattawat Choosuwan

Senior Data Consultant at a government with 11-50 employees

Real-time data connection enhances workflow and decision-making process

An area for improvement in Tableau is the Explorer license type. It is not as useful, and the product owner should enhance its benefits or clarify its role. Additionally, the frequent updates with many versions available for download can be confusing and could affect stability. They should avoid providing access to older versions on their website.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interactive features that appear in the report were good. The external rendering option they give with multi servers was also good."

"It scales well. It used to have only a max of four I-servers, but I think recently, somewhere in version 10, they doubled that, so you can have eight I-servers now."

"We prefer having our analytics capabilities in a single platform, which MicroStrategy's offers."

"The feature I found most valuable is the drop and drag functionality available."

"The ability to integrate with PPT is another plus. The platform's ability to write back data directly to the database is also good."

"It is always nice to have one solution in a single platform. You can do pretty much everything, instead of having to get a little bit here or a little bit there."

"The solution is a very good enterprise tool with excellent enterprise functionality for security and user access. It also works perfectly in distribution, with everyone getting their own reports. It is very complex, so you can do whatever you want. If you want to make some data limitations, you can do it. I also like the internal in-memory engine with the Symantec layer. This makes the solution pretty powerful."

"Dependency on development teams, as well as managing the platform, has reduced a lot with Visual Insight."

More MicroStrategy pros

"I have not personally used any such products related to this service, however based on the popular opinion, Microsoft Power BI is more popular. We have never switched from this software due to infrastructure and license related costs. However, my team acknowledges that the Power BI is much more enhanced and includes features that are easier to use, including its drag and drop features. I am not sure, if OBIEE has these features, due to lack of updated versions."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to set up the automated delivery of reports."

"It has helped to consolidate data and report on a single version of the truth."

"A great feature of the solution is its stability."

"I like that Oracle OBIEE comes with more options. For example, more options with data security, user security, and other security. It's more complicated than Microsoft, but it gives you more options. They also added the part for machine learning, which is good."

"It mostly supports enterprise level data. We have millions of records on a daily basis."

"The complexity that OBIEE can handle in the form of RPD is unmatched. I haven't found this level of complexity in other reporting tools, especially when dealing with complex calculations that are not readily available in the reporting layer."

"It has a lot workaround in order to do the report. data blending, and getting information from big data sources."

More Oracle OBIEE pros

"The action feature which Tableau has is very useful for us. If we click on one visualization, it will pass the value to another visualization. That interactivity within different visualizations is the most valuable feature of Tableau."

"Provides a very good sound analysis quotient."

"I like the solution's web version, more so than Power BI's web version. It just makes it easier to drag and drop things and to blend data on the backend. It simplifies the process."

"It provides business users with a tool, so they are not dependent on IT."

"Overall, Tableau is a very good tool."

"It's the ease of use. It is also a self-service tool so it decreases the burden on having centralized IT-type teams or developers."

"This solution has improved insights into quantitative data."

"Easy to create graphs and visualizations."

More Tableau pros

Cons

"Native VI on mobile apps and better android support are lacking."

"When we come to them with a problem, they might know more of a generalized solution, but not one targeted to our industry."

"We would like access to more storage and access to more metadata to build the right programs that can construct all the stuff for us instead of us having to type it in all the time."

"We had some problems with customer service and support."

"The solution lacks good visualization. They should work on the user interface to make it more slick and modern."

"I wouldn't recommend it if you have no data warehouses; for example, you would need to find a lot of knowledge to transform the data in MicroStrategy itself. So that could be quite challenging."

"They need to supply the support system that's just not there right now. They don't have Enterprise Manager classes. You need in-depth classes to understand what those metrics are doing, to understand the table associations from one to the other. You can't just go and pick it up and understand that DT_DAY connects to all of these tables, without going into Architect, looking at the source tables. I, as a analyst, a slightly technical user, I don't have the expertise to do that. Business users definitely don't have the expertise to do that."

"There might be opportunities for reporting or data analysis, perhaps even in the realm of simulation."

More MicroStrategy cons

"The pricing of the solution should be bettered."

"The functionality to customize and modify reports has been removed, and it would be beneficial to reinstall it, as it allows greater customization and flexibility in creating reports."

"I would rate its current performance as a five out of ten because a lot of features are missed out in OBIEE."

"There are times we have slowness when processing the reports with Oracle OBIEE. Improving the performance would be beneficial."

"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."

"We needed some technical expertise during setup."

"The platform's interface needs improvement."

"There are a lot of aspects of Oracle OBIEE that are exceptionally complicated, make things unnecessarily difficult for everyone who uses it. In terms of the integrations, Oracle needs to improve a little more, but I believe that they have tried to capture all those issues. The issues we are facing in the Oracle OBIEE 12C versions, in the Oracle Analytical Server Center or Analytical Cloud versions, Oracle has managed to overcome the challenges."

More Oracle OBIEE cons

"If I have to develop any, for example, pie charts, I can develop them just fine. However, if I have to develop a donut chart, that I cannot do it in a simple way. There are tricks that I need to use if I have to design a donut chart. It should be more flexible and provide more visualization options."

"I find data prepping in Tableau challenging to understand, perhaps because I am new to it. It sometimes requires extensive investigation to determine why the data does not appear correctly."

"There should be more GIS features, such as location analysis, which is quite limited. There are very few location-based functionalities."

"The performance could be better."

"Its documentation can be improved so that a user can get a good hands-on experience. Tableau is well documented, and on their website, there are a lot of tutorials that are available for free. I started my learning process through those tutorials, but there are certain loopholes in those tutorials, which only got filled through a couple of good YouTube channels that talk about Tableau. YouTube helped me a lot. So, the documentation could be better, I understand that it is evolving day by day, and with more usage, there would be more such documentation."

"There should be stronger data modules for the platform."

"An area needing improvement involves the complexity of the product should you need to alter a lot of parameters. If you have technical servers, much interface, different providers and more serious processes, that will be time consuming."

"Tableau has so many functions, so sometimes it's hard to find the right solution quickly. I have to search multiple menu bars to find the right command."

More Tableau cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are waiting to switch to Microsoft Power BI because MicroStrategy is too costly."

"The solution’s licensing cost is expensive."

"The solution is scalable. A little expensive perhaps, but it is scalable."

"All BI software vendors' list prices are high. It's about a price that fits the customer's needs. And I think MicroStrategy has some flexibility in its pricing model where we can easily demonstrate a total cost of ownership comparison against any of the other players."

"The price was good. We have had great support along the way."

"They need to work on their license structure. They are not competitive against somebody like SAP BusinessObjects. We had a quote that was almost a third the price, coming from SAP BusinessObjects, and it's not a better platform. It's not cheaper. They do concurrent user licensing, while MicroStrategy does named user licensing, and that was literally the only difference. But it made a $500,000 difference. They've got to do something to make themselves more competitive. Maybe it's assessing your business users and what you really expect them to use, and maybe giving a reduced price on that. But they are already giving us a 60% discount and they were still a million or so above, over a three-year time period. That doesn't account for synergies as we get from on-site resources that are already available, but I thought that that was a big, big deficit for them."

"The pricing list itself is not publicly accessible, so it's a bit opaque."

"I am unsure what the licensing costs are for this solution however, development costs are around $100,000 per year."

More MicroStrategy pricing and cost advice

"This is a very costly product."

"This was not an expensive product for us, although the price varies depending on conditions for each company."

"It's expensive."

"In our organization, we use a user-based license for Oracle OBIEE, and I've heard that the license cost is based on the number of users."

"Be prepared to spend a lot of time and money."

"The cost of this solution is a little bit high compared with other products like Zoho, so reducing it would make OBIEE more competitive."

"The price of Oracle OBIEE is expensive, it is difficult for a small business to afford."

"For the license in part of Oracle, my company makes yearly payments."

More Oracle OBIEE pricing and cost advice

"Paying for users you never setup or buying expensive desktop licenses for users who can solve their users with web editing on the server are the two biggest expenses."

"The price is definitely a point because smaller firms don't use Tableau as it's an expensive tool."

"The price of Tableau could improve. The license is too expensive."

"The initial cost that is set according to CPU cores is expensive."

"Tableau has core-based and user-based licensing, and it is tied to scalability. The core-based licensing is about you buying a certain number of cores, and there is no restriction on the number of users who can use Tableau. The restriction is only on the number of cores. In user-based subscription licensing, there is a restriction on the number of users. Big companies and government organizations with a lot of users typically go for core-based licensing. User-based subscription licensing is a more common model. It has user roles such as creator, explorer, and viewer. A creator is someone who does the groundwork or development work. An explorer is someone who is into middle management but is not technically savvy, such as a category head. A viewer is like a typical decision-maker in senior management. For each role, Tableau is priced differently. The viewer role has the minimum price, and the creator role has the highest price. This pricing is available on their website. Everybody can see it."

"There is a license required, we pay an annual license which is priced fair."

"I believe it has a lifelong license, and once you purchase it, you don't have to renew it, but I'm not sure."

"It is a bit difficult for some people when they hear $70.00 per month, as some solutions are available for less than $10.00 or for free."

More Tableau pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

849,210 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Comparison Review

it_user6330

Product Manager at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

May 2, 2013

MicroStrategy vs. Tableau

After a recent presentation, several attendees asked me about the applications of Visual Insights and Tableau. Many companies are investing in both tools and are trying to figure out the right tool for specific applications Tableau has found its sweet-spot as an agile discovery tool that analysts…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

44%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about MicroStrategy?

The stability of the product is good.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for MicroStrategy?

For larger businesses, I think the pricing is logical, but for smaller companies, it can be a bit costly.

See all answers

What needs improvement with MicroStrategy?

MicroStrategy could learn from Power BI's user-friendly interface. I find the user interface lacking when compared to...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 f...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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....

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs MicroStrategy

Compared 16% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs MicroStrategy

Compared 9% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs MicroStrategy

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Cognos vs MicroStrategy

Compared 8% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs MicroStrategy

Compared 4% of the time

More MicroStrategy Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 31% of the time

Oracle Analytics Cloud vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 13% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 4% of the time

SAS Visual Analytics vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 3% of the time

More Oracle OBIEE Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Tableau

Compared 19% of the time

Domo vs Tableau

Compared 12% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Tableau

Compared 7% of the time

Databricks vs Tableau

Compared 6% of the time

Apache Superset vs Tableau

Compared 2% of the time

More Tableau Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

MicroStrategy

April 2025

Download MicroStrategy product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle OBIEE

April 2025

Download Oracle OBIEE product report

Buyer's Guide

Tableau

April 2025

Download Tableau product report

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

Company: Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR) is a leading worldwide provider of enterprise software platforms. With direct operations in 26 countries worldwide and approximately 2,000 employees, our mission is to provide enterprise analytics, mobility, and security platforms that are flexible, powerful, scalable and user-friendly. To learn more, visit MicroStrategy online, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Product portfoilio:

MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise™ empowers leading organizations to analyze vast amounts of data and distribute actionable business insight throughout an enterprise through two distinct offerings: MicroStrategy Analytics™ and MicroStrategy Desktop™. MicroStrategy Analytics delivers reports and dashboards, and enables users to conduct ad hoc analysis and share insights anywhere, anytime, via mobile devices or the Web. It also combines the agility and productivity of self-service visual data discovery with the security, scalability, and governance features of enterprise-grade business intelligence. MicroStrategy Desktop is a standalone, on-premise visual data discovery tool designed to enable business users to analyze and understand their data. MicroStrategy Mobile™ enables organizations to rapidly build custom business applications that deliver analytics combined with transactions, multimedia, and custom workflows to mobile devices. MicroStrategy Secure Cloud™ combines all of the enterprise analytics, mobile, and security features in MicroStrategy 10 Secure Enterprise with powerful and scalable data integration, validation, and warehousing services — all delivered in an environment where organizations can deploy transformational analytics applications in minutes.

Usher, MicroStrategy’s breakthrough security solution, is a powerful mobile security platform designed to dematerialize traditional forms of identity verification (such as passwords, tokens, and physical badges) and replace them with a single mobile identity badge that is cryptographically linked to its owner’s smartphone and dynamically linked to an enterprise’s existing identity repositories. Usher works on standard Android and iOS smartphones, and also boasts an Apple Watch™ integration.

MicroStrategy

Oracle OBIEE (Oracle Business Information Enterprise Edition) is a business intelligence (BI) tool developed by Oracle. OBIEE will gather, store and analyze an organization's network data and compile the information to create reports, dashboard graphs, and performance analysis. OBIEE’s unique platform allows clients to discover new awareness and improve the speed of completing important business decisions by providing robust visual tools and intuitive realization coupled with the latest unmatched enterprise analytics available. OBIEE helps IT enterprise organizations to experience an intelligent view of all enterprise data from across all sources and empowers trusted users with increased levels of reliable, dependable access, interaction, and the ability to utilize the data to increase the overall effectiveness and productivity of the organization.

OBIEE provides unique immediate mobile access, intuitive dashboards, robust reporting, real-time alerts, metadata search, procedure management, direct access to Big Data resources, enlightened in-memory computing, and seamless systems management processes. These features seamlessly combine to make Oracle OBIEE a complete, top-of-the-line broad solution that is cost-effective, minimizes TCO, and provides a competitive, quick ROI for the entire organization.

Oracle OBIEE Top Features

Complete comprehension: Oracle OBIEE offers a full range of BI strategies, including intuitive smart dashboards, dynamic alerts and detection, efficient workflows, enterprise reporting, MS Office integration, real-time predictive analysis, and more. OBIEE also includes many next-generation options, including mission critical scalability and performance, diverse data access and integration, and a modern, robust, service-oriented architecture.

Hot-pluggable: OBIEE will take advantage of existing IT relationships, both Oracle and non-Oracle databases, solutions, and applications. Organizations that partner with OBIEE have access to an entire library of analytic tools that are immediately deployable and provide an improved TCO and a super-fast ROI. Additionally, in an outstanding collaboration with Hyperion, OBIEE incorporates BI tools that integrate well with the current suite to supply the grandest selection of BI tools available on the market today.

Extensive: OBIEE is very user-friendly and extremely intuitive, and the 100% Web UI brings robust and dynamic BI from diverse sources to any audience, distributing awareness when and where users require it to manage activities, decisions, and processes.

Reviews from Real Users

Sandeep V., Process System Engineer at a comms service provider, tells us, “This solution is very easy for people who are building ad-hoc things. It's an enterprise solution so it can be deployed for a lot of users. There are some great new features that come with the 12c like data visualization, desktop BI Publisher, automation, and interactive dashboards. The product has good features. “

A user who is a CEO at a consultancy relates, “The most valuable feature is the visualization. The data warehousing, data storage, and data wrangling are all features that are in there, and it's one of the better products out there. A good thing is that for large datasets, it's very stable, especially when you have an Oracle database.”

A user who is a Principal Business Intelligence Architect at a computer software company suggests, "It is very biased towards Oracle infrastructure. One of the major red flags we have at the moment against Oracle is that it doesn't support deployment on other cloud providers. We're quite heavily vested in AWS as our infrastructure, and Oracle is yet to formally support deploying on those virtual infrastructure instances. That's quite disappointing, and it also cuts them out of over 70% of the market."

Oracle

Tableau is a tool for data visualization and business intelligence that allows businesses to report insights through easy-to-use, customizable visualizations and dashboards. Tableau makes it exceedingly simple for its customers to organize, manage, visualize, and comprehend data. It enables users to dig deep into the data so that they can see patterns and gain meaningful insights.

Make data-driven decisions with confidence thanks to Tableau’s assistance in providing faster answers to queries, solving harder problems more easily, and offering new insights more frequently. Tableau integrates directly to hundreds of data sources, both in the cloud and on premises, making it simpler to begin research. People of various skill levels can quickly find actionable information using Tableau’s natural language queries, interactive dashboards, and drag-and-drop capabilities. By quickly creating strong calculations, adding trend lines to examine statistical summaries, or clustering data to identify relationships, users can ask more in-depth inquiries.

Tableau has many valuable key features:

Tableau dashboards provide a complete view of your data through visualizations, visual objects, text, and more.
Tableau provides convenient, real-time options to collaborate with other users and instantly share data in the form of visualizations, sheets, and dashboards.
Tableau ensures connectivity to both live data sources and data extraction from external data sources as in-memory data. This gives users the flexibility to use data from more than one source without any restrictions.
Tableau gives many data source option, ranging from spreadsheets, big data, on-premise files, relational databases, non-relational databases, data warehouses, and big data, to on-cloud data.
Tableau has a lot of pre-installed information on maps, such as cities, postal codes, and administrative boundaries.
Tableau has a foolproof security system based on authentication and permission systems for data connections and user access. Tableau also gives you the freedom to integrate with other security protocols.

Tableau stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its fast data access, easy creation of visualizations, and its stability. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

Romil S., Deputy General Manager of IT at Nayara Energy, notes, "Its visualizations are good, and its features make the development process a little less time-consuming. It has an in-memory extract feature that allows us to extract data and keep it on the server, and then our users can use it quickly.

Ariful M., Consulting Practice Partner of Data, Analytics & AI at FH, writes, “Tableau is very flexible and easy to learn. It has drag-and-drop function analytics, and its design is very good.”

Salesforce

Sample Customers

Allstate Insurance, Barneys New York, Boston Children's Hospital, Buenos Aires Department of the Treasury, Campbell Soup Company, DHL, eBay, eHarmony, Facebook, Four Seasons Hotels Inc., Godiva, Hard Rock International, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pfizer, SECO (Swiss Government Unemployment Agency), Starbucks, Texas A&M University, Thomson Reuters Markets, US House of Representatives, and the US Postal Service.

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.

Buyer's Guide

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

March 2025

Download Free Report

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

849,210 professionals have used our research since 2012.