Oracle OBIEE vs ThoughtSpot comparison

Oracle and ThoughtSpot are both solutions in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category. Oracle is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.9, while ThoughtSpot is ranked #17 with an average rating of 7.5. Additionally, 87% of Oracle users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of ThoughtSpot users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Oracle OBIEE and ThoughtSpot based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two BI (Business Intelligence) Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Oracle OBIEE vs. ThoughtSpot Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Oracle OBIEE vs. ThoughtSpot

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM Cognos

Featured Reviews

Carlos Larrad Salgado

Deputy Director Operations Management Control at Mapfre

Improved the quality of our KPIs, while reducing calls to the IT department

I don't like that when we use Colab packages, we get less functionality. For example, you can make groups of data with Excel or with the data sets from the packages, but when you use the Colab packages directly, you can only group the data when you analyze it with Analysis Studio. I think Cognos needs to improve more on this functionality. The user experience is also very important. Cognos is not very easy to understand sometimes, especially when they change the layout but keep the functionality the same. The help is not very graphic and they have no examples. Cognos has to make a big effort to help with understanding the functionality by improving the documentation. There is a lot of documentation, but the examples are hard to find and they should make their help section easier to understand for non-technical users.

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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.

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Anthony Fiorino

SVP, Head of Enterprise Data Mgmt & Data Intelligence at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

You can drill down into any data right out of the box, with a straightforward deployment, and great support

The most valuable feature is probably the core functionality itself, which is the ability to search and drill down into any data right out of the box. Of course, there's data modeling needed, and things like that, but I can throw it at a set, and I can get up and running in a matter of hours. If a new group comes to me and says, "Hey, I've heard about ThoughtSpot. I have some data and I want to be able to do some analytics, do some profiling, do some BI against it." In a couple of hours, I connect to their source and I just do it. Now for a production product, we have to model and perform it over time, but at least I can get people up and running extremely fast with a tool that's intuitive and easy to use.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of IBM Cognos is security. The solution has updated features that other competitors' solutions come out with long after IBM Cognos has had them."

"Previously, we were doing static reporting. Management would request a report, and it would take staff a week or more to provide it. With Cognos, we have dynamic reporting, and it has reduced both reporting and decision making times significantly. With the solution's dashboard, the company's management team has updated records at their fingertips. This means that they can directly access the data they need to make decisions."

"Self-service is possible through the use of dashboards, which are also very intuitive. Stories can be used to pin snapshots, tell the story for meetings, etc."

"Report Studio: This is the most powerful and sophisticated tool for professional reporting."

"The initial setup was straightforward."

"The main difference that I like about Cognos compared to other solutions is its data splitting functionality. We have all our company data inside the Cognos environment and so we prefer to split the information Cognos itself. It's more efficient this way."

"For planning, forecasting, in-boxing, modeling in general and for predicting numbers and doing work analysis, they are excellent."

"When it comes to decision-making, the product is very useful and used in many departments since a lot of people prefer the reports to be generated by IBM Cognos."

More IBM Cognos pros

"Easy to create ad hoc reporting for different solutions."

"The main features of this solution are that it is easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. When I retrieve the data from the database it is in a very raw form, then when I use the Oracle Report Builder it has advanced intelligence features to allow me to view and make changes to the data easily."

"The “Business Model & Mapping” layer in the Administration Tool, because the maintenance and evolution processes are greatly facilitated."

"The visualization is very good."

"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."

"Can utilize SQL queries to generate reports directly."

"The most valuable feature of Oracle OBIEE is its ability to handle large volumes of data and provide traditional BI functionalities that developers can easily understand."

"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."

More Oracle OBIEE pros

"The scalability is good."

"I would say the return on investment is good. Whatever we invested, we got results. We have been finding it easy to use and onboard new use cases."

"It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box."

"It is easy to set up the solution."

"ThoughtSpot takes the modifying of existing reports out of our hands."

"The initial setup was very straightforward."

"I like ThoughtSpot's search capabilities. You can also create custom analytics even if you aren't an experienced data analyst. We have users with no data analytics experience making some of the dashboards we've created, copying components, and customizing them to their specific use cases."

"The ability to do ad hoc explorations of data has been most valuable."

Cons

"In terms of what could be improved, I would say, monitoring, monitoring, monitoring. Some improvements in monitoring would be helpful. I'd like to see more monitoring of specific reports and fields. The way the auditing is now is very limited, so I'd like to see more of that - of the monitoring."

"Cognos charts are not as fast as those of the other tools, even with DQM (dynamic query mode)."

"The performance is a bottleneck and something that can be improved."

"The solution's support could be better."

"Most of our company's customers want to be able to deploy IBM Cognos on a web application and use it as a desktop application, which is not possible currently."

"I would like to see is more easy building, movement in the reports, and dashboard functionality within reporting. Overall more simple elements within reports. If the elements are simple then you don't have to render a full page, but you can move separate parts in the page."

"I would like for the platform to become more standard. If we make a development on our report and our dashboard, it will not be used in another solution. That means there is no portability for the developers."

"One key area for improvement is the need to improve the self-service nature and functionality of the product in terms of visual analytics."

More IBM Cognos cons

"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."

"Even though we have a feature to enable the physical query to be seen in the log, in case of any issues, it is challenging to debug and see or identify where is the issue. For example, we designed the OBIEE repository and deployed it into the server, and we are now accessing and creating a report. For some reason, if the report is not working as expected, it is very difficult to identify the issue. We have a feature to see the physical query that is being generated in the central OBIEE server. I feel that this feature should have been available at the repository level so that while designing the repository, we can select the presentation columns and the query it is going to create. This will avoid the additional task of deploying a feature into the server and then testing the report. It will also make the implementation process friendly if, while designing the repository, we can see: How is a feature working? Are any of the presentation columns selected? How is the query being generated? Which query is being generated? Are any joints used? What kind of joints are used? Having this kind of information will make Oracle OBIEE more powerful and developer-friendly."

"The tool's downside is that it is very expensive, making it an area where improvements are needed."

"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."

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

"If the data is large, the dashboard takes a really long time. So, based on the database, if you have around a million cost contacts, the load time is very low, and the dashboard fails."

"The performance and the complex setup are the main reason for switching to Qlik Sense."

"For a beginner, this is a product that is difficult to learn. You cannot learn it quickly."

More Oracle OBIEE cons

"I would like to see more flexibility in adding the pins. Currently, we have four different sizes in which I can add pins, but I would like to be able to resize my pins."

"In terms of features, I'd like to be able to pivot data - for example, going from rows to columns. It's not easy to do."

"A customized visualization is lacking in this product."

"The dashboards could give you more ability to fine tune the appearance. You get a great deal more control over how something looks in Power BI than you do in ThoughtSpot."

"ThoughtSpot is a fairly new product, so some usability aspects aren't as mature as we'd like them to be. One example is their organizational methodology, like how objects are organized in their dashboards inside the product. They're all on a flat list, which works if you've got five or 10 dashboards. However, it's insufficient when you're a large enterprise with multiple groups looking at the same dashboards. It isn't organized well."

"The most difficult thing I found is that it only deals with the files and does not have direct connectivity to databases."

"If I want to order columns, this feature is not there."

"The one area of the solution that I do hear needs improvement is on the visualization front."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is pretty expensive."

"On a scale from one to ten where one is low pricing and ten is high pricing, I would rate this solution at eight."

"There is some additional licensing that we needed to purchase because we were touching data outside of our core data platform. The cost was approximately $25,000 for the additional licenses, which were approximate 45 licenses. For the application itself, updates, and the core platform it was approximately $50,000. Giving a total cost of $75,000 annually for our usage of IBM Cognos."

"The licensing costs are a little bit higher for IBM Cognos. I don't think there is any additional cost apart from the licensing charges."

"The cost of IBM Cognos it's more or less the same as most of the other solutions on the market. They're very competitive with the rest of the market and it is not the most expensive product."

"I don't know the exact cost, but I believe Cognos is quite expensive, especially when it comes to the support consultants and the procedures that need to be applied."

"My company uses IBM Cognos with another IBM product, so I think only one license is used."

"It is averagely priced."

More IBM Cognos pricing and cost advice

"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."

"Compared with the other products in the market, I feel Oracle OBIEE is an expensive product."

"All products from Oracle are very pricey."

"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."

"It is reasonable, but it depends on how you're going to use it. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

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

"Power BI is less expensive than Oracle OBIEE. A benefit to Power BI is having the option to work with concurrent licensing."

More Oracle OBIEE pricing and cost advice

"I give the pricing a six out of ten."

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

56%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

13%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

24%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 ...

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What do you like most about IBM Cognos?

The solution's most valuable feature is its ease of use, which makes it easily compatible with other tools.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Cognos?

I need improvements, particularly with the Framework Manager, which has an outdated user interface from older version...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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What do you like most about ThoughtSpot?

It's easy to drill down or expand data to get more details right out of the box.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?

I like the pricing structure. I get billed by how much data I put in, not how many people are looking at the data. It...

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What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?

We'd like more flexibility with the calendar as our fiscal year does not align with the calendar year. We have to loa...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Power BI vs IBM Cognos

Compared 13% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs IBM Cognos

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs IBM Cognos

Compared 8% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs IBM Cognos

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM Cognos Competitors

Microsoft Power BI vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 29% of the time

Oracle Analytics Cloud vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 12% of the time

Tableau vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 10% of the time

SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 10% of the time

Qlik Sense vs Oracle OBIEE

Compared 4% of the time

More Oracle OBIEE Competitors

Tableau vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 28% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 26% of the time

Looker vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 13% of the time

Databricks vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs ThoughtSpot

Compared 8% of the time

More ThoughtSpot Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM Cognos

November 2024

Download IBM Cognos product report

Buyer's Guide

Oracle OBIEE

November 2024

Download Oracle OBIEE product report

Buyer's Guide

ThoughtSpot

October 2024

Download ThoughtSpot product report

Also Known As

Cognos, Cognos Analytics, IBM Cognos Analytics

OBIEE, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle BI, Oracle BI EE 11g

No data available

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IBM

Oracle

ThoughtSpot

Overview

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence provides a wide range of tools to help you analyze your organization's data. IBM Cognos BI allows businesses to monitor events and metrics, create and view business reports, and analyze data to help them make effective business decisions.

IBM Cognos applies techniques to describe, summarize, and compare data, and draw conclusions. This allows users to see trends and discover anomalies or variances that may not be evident by simply reading data. Data sources that contain information from different areas of a business can be stored in separate packages. Users can see only information that they have been granted access to, based on their group or role.

IBM Cognos BI consolidates the following business intelligence functions into a single web-based solution:

IBM Cognos Insight: Create personal and managed workspaces for data analysis. Using these interactive workspaces, you can share insight results with managers. Cognos Insight supports write-back, and you can also use these workspaces to capture and integrate management goals, commitments, and forecasts.
IBM Cognos Workspace: With IBM Cognos Workspace, you can create rich, interactive workspaces using IBM Cognos content as well as data from external sources. You can view and open your favorite workspaces and reports, edit content in your workspaces, and share your workspaces via email.
IBM Cognos Analytics: IBM Cognos Analytics utilizes built-in AI and intuitive searches which helps users to quickly create the visualizations and a wide range of reports. Cognos Analytics provides cognitive and managed self-service, enabling you to gain insights from controlled and trusted data.
IBM Cognos Report Studio and IBM Cognos Query Studio: Easily create structured and query reports. IBM Cognos allows users to create application and report templates. In addition, report authors can reuse report objects to apply filters, fields, and styles to reports. Users can set the language of the user interface and report content according to the user's native language.
IBM Cognos Event Studio: Receive notifications of events that occur within your organization in real time. Event Studio enables the creation of agents that detect the occurrence of business events, failures, or anomalies, based on the change of specific events or data conditions. Notification can be sent via email, publication in the portal, or by triggering reports.
IBM Cognos Connection: This is the Web portal for IBM Cognos BI and is the central area for accessing all the IBM Cognos functions. In the web portal, users can schedule and distribute reports, create tasks, administer the server and the access permissions, and more.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM Cognos stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its powerful analysis tool and its reporting capabilities.

Prasad B., a senior software engineer at a financial services firm, notes, “The product is a very good reporting tool and is very flexible. It allows for the users to get a scheduled report. We can receive automated reports as well. They are easy to schedule on a weekly or monthly basis. It is very fast. I mean in means of report output, it's very fast compared to the actual clients involved.”

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."

ThoughtSpot is a powerful business intelligence tool that allows easy searching and drilling into data. Its ad hoc exploration and query-based search features are highly valued, and it is easy to set up, stable, and scalable.

The solution is used for reporting purposes, self-service BI, and embedding into other applications for customers to do self-service analytics. It helps businesses with metrics, KPIs, and important insights by sourcing data from various sources into one golden source and visualizing it in an easy way for the business to consume. The pricing model is ideal, charging for data rather than the number of users.

Sample Customers

More than 23,000 leading organizations across multiple industries use Cognos. Some examples of Cognos customers include BMW Financial Services, Quinte Health Care, Troy Corporation, Michigan State University, and GKN Land System.

Banca Transilvania, BeckmanCoulter, Hong Kong Housing Society, HealthShare, Ivanhoe Cambridge Unifies, and Home Credit, and Finance Bank.

Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs

Buyer's Guide

Oracle OBIEE vs. ThoughtSpot

October 2024

Free Report: Oracle OBIEE vs. ThoughtSpot

Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle OBIEE vs. ThoughtSpot and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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