Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Oracle Essbase vs SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Essbase
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Database Development and Management (10th)
SAP BusinessObjects Busines...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
103
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Oracle Essbase and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Oracle Essbase is designed for Database Development and Management and holds a mindshare of 1.2%, up 0.6% compared to last year.
SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 4.1% mindshare, down 5.4% since last year.
Database Development and Management
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Prithwish Kumar Ghosh - PeerSpot reviewer
Handles a huge amount of data at a time and offers good processing speed
You will definitely get bugs, for sure, with every version that comes. Oracle is active in creating fixes, and they release patches. If you are using Oracle Cloud and the infrastructure is owned by Oracle, you don't need to worry. They will push the bug fixes themselves. When we use PBCS or EPBCS applications on the cloud, they handle those things. It might be a downtime during the weekends for 30 minutes, but it's a very stable area. You don't actually use Essbase when you use PBCS or EPBCS. It is in the backend, and things are happening there as well, for sure, but you won't get to see the console. You'll just see the front end, the planning part.
MukeshMathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Visualization is better than other tools, offers good dashboard and analytics features but it is not easy to adapt to the product
As per my opinion, because SAP is a very worldwide product or very useful product, I'm not talking about improvement, because I just think that SAP can focus on the pricing factor. The cost of this product, so every company is not suitable to use it. Because of the very huge amount of integrations, every organization can not use it. So, it is a very costly product. Secondly, from an educational point of view, So, it is not easy to adapt to each and every IT person because some, most, in India, most cities, such as Delhi, Bangalore, or Chennai, only metro support the educational platform for that. So, just my suggestion is SAP should focus on every user; it should be easy to pick the product and, easy to carry, easy to use in every life. So, SAP must try to improve in this part.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is highly efficient and easily scalable, particularly for handling large databases."
"Essbase is a kind of backbone, or back end, for systems like Hyperion Planning."
"I have found the most valuable aspect is the user-friendly environment and current features."
"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."
"Oracle Essbase is a web integration system that integrates with other data systems."
"It is very fast compared to other normal databases, like SQL and MySQL."
"The solution is scalable."
"The solution can handle a large volume of data."
"The most important feature of BusinessObjects is its integration with the SAP ERP system. If an organization is using SAP as its ERP system, and they want to do business intelligence, reporting, or analysis, SAP BusinessObjects is the only tool that I see doing that quite efficiently. That's because of the fact it is tightly integrated, and it gives a good user experience in terms of faster reporting. Its integration is the feature that I have found most valuable, but there are also other factors."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that we are able to build all dashboards with self-service BI and are able to provide our business users with self-service BI. We are building a repository on top of our data warehouse and building all the dashboards and KPIs."
"It has been extremely valuable, to combine data from various data sources."
"Ease of report development is a key feature."
"It gives you a lot of flexibility in designing your dashboards."
"Enables us to present data with Smart Objects that can be embedded within presentations and which automatically update when the presentations are run."
"We use it to identify critical KPIs to senior management."
"BusinessObjects can handle a lot of usage on the front end, and many users can view these reports. It's a relatively stable and secure tool."
 

Cons

"The initial setup is pretty complex."
"It's an expensive product to use."
"The consolidation engine, which is HFM or FCCS, needs some room for improvement."
"The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be better if there was a cloud platform available for Oracle Essbase."
"They should improve the solution's performance."
"The solution could enhance business analytics. I delved into the data using Oracle Essbase to create a new support tool."
"I would like to see an integration with application performance management and a version control management tool."
"The ability to drive external reporting out for development could be improved."
"Factoring in total implementation and maintenance costs, SAP BusinessObjects is too expensive. If you deal with a huge amount of data, you can go with BusinessObjects. However, if you are a medium-sized company with a modest amount of data, you can opt for another solution."
"The solution can improve by having more analytical features."
"The platform should be a bit more user-friendly."
"Most of the Apps right now are into dashboarding. This tool, for the Crystal Reports in the phase I'm primarily working on, does not have those dashboarding capabilities, like in the other advanced tools like Power BI or ClickView, and compared to them the dashboard generation is not that great."
"​This product could be improved with Cloud Integrations and Predictive Analytics functions integration."
"It would be good if they could integrate the possibility for end users to create end models for themselves that they can use, especially for site operators, and if they could provide the end user not only the self-service BI, but also the self-service analytics, based on a predefined model, the same way that Oracle did."
"Recently, it's become less stable if I am working on Citrix."
"I don't like the fact that I have to use two tools. Web Intelligence is good for reporting and all kinds of stuff, but I would rather have one product. All the reporting features of Web Intelligence should be developed within Lumira. A lot of predictive abilities have been brought into the cloud version of SAP Analytics. It would be nice to see a lot of newer technologies and AI. Predictive capabilities are becoming a little more standard. Instead of having to get another model, we are just looking for one solution to deal with analytics including predictive."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a costly solution."
"I believe the licensing is on a monthly base."
"The solution is expensive."
"Essbase is competitively priced."
"The price and the pricing model are fine. We find the solution does not give us a lot of additional value."
"The SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform has to improve its licensing cost."
"​It is not an expensive platform. The licensing is for a package of users starting at 10 users."
"SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform is an expensive application."
"Just work with SAP to make sure you have enough licenses but don't go overboard."
"Its price is fair."
"It is not a subscription model, but you must purchase a perpetual license for this."
"We are satisfied with the solution, but we are not satisfied with the licensing cost which SAP offers. They offer one lumpsum licensing which does everything. That is not the right strategy, because sometimes you don't have power users, they are only viewers, but we need to buy the full license for them. This is not something we want to continue with."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Database Development and Management solutions are best for your needs.
825,609 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user6663 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 25, 2013
SAP Business Objects vs. Microsoft BI
A quick look at the whole idea on another weblogs gives you a sense that all of them just talked about very brief things like report refresh feature in BO or cube feature in MS Analysis Service. I choose MS BI and I want to share my reasons and opinions on why I choose it and give you another quick…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
 

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?
If I got the opportunity to work with Hyperion, which is the best product, I would definitely go with that. The main concern is that Oracle is ending on-premises server support, so it would be bett...
What is your primary use case for Oracle Essbase?
We provide complete ownership of this application to Walmart projects. In the UK system, we support and develop for the Asda account, known as Eltham. We provide installation and support to over 50...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
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 been working on and off Tableau for about a year, but getting to work on it consta...
What do you like most about SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform?
What I like the most about SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform is that it has significantly improved our decision-making process.
 

Also Known As

Essbase
SAP BusinessObjects BI Platform, SAP BusinessObjects, Business Objects
 

Learn More

 

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.
SRAM, Kennametal, Fairfax Water, British American Tobacco, Velux, and FedEx.
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle, Nutanix, SolarWinds and others in Database Development and Management. Updated: November 2024.
825,609 professionals have used our research since 2012.