Oracle BI vs. Tableau: Which Business Intelligence Tool Is Better?
The choice between these 2 equally good BI software will depend on the scale, complexity of data, and the objective of the enterprises towards BI implementation.
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Join For FreeIn the new normal as enterprises strengthen their efforts towards digitization, the need to use data to derive valuable insights for strategic decision-making has also risen. Precisely why the Business Intelligence market is seeing tremendous growth. According to a recent report the BI market is expected to reach USD 27870 Million by 2026. With this boom in the BI market, the number of Business Intelligence software has also increased. There are over 700+ BI tools listed on Capterra and close to 500 on G2 under embedded BI software and Data Visualization tools. In this article, we will provide a detailed comparison of the two most popular BI software in the market: Oracle BI and Tableau.
Oracle BI vs Tableau - A Neck to Neck Comparison
A large number of enterprises use either Oracle BI or Tableau for their BI requirements. The user list of both these BI software includes some of the biggest global brands. So, let us see what makes Oracle BI software and Tableau popular and how these compare when it comes to product features, pricing, developer experience, and more.
Categories |
Oracle BI |
Tableau |
Product Features And Developer Experience |
||
Database Connectors |
Approximately 27 connectors including ODBC connectors to the back-end databases for easy access to data. |
70+ supported data sources via inbuilt connectors along with Tableau Support. Even more, using ODBC connectors to the backend relational databases. |
Ease Of Setup |
It requires IT support because of the slightly complicated setup and engineering requirements. The set-up is not very developer-friendly. |
Once the data model is in hand, then setting up dashboards and also basic inbuilt analytics for data cleaning and analysis is at fingertips. |
Extendibility |
Option to increase the backend database connector. |
Not each and every data source can be brought into the data model very easily and at times customer SQL is needed. |
Ease Of Development |
The development of visualization and dashboard is quite engineering heavy |
With the natural language processing interface the development of visualization with simple analytics can be done by non-technical people as well |
Map View |
No Map viewer support in Oracle makes it pretty hard to show geographical information of any kind which is a major blocker for reporting geospatial class of data. |
Inbuilt visualization of Maps and has the ability to draw custom maps as well using geospatial data of many formats. This is a major advantage when it comes to data visualization and reporting. |
Analytics Functions |
Has few analytics functions that come at the cost of performance degradation. |
Window functions can help to use columns for a data source at run time for visualization. |
ETL Support |
Oracle is now ending support of non-Oracle ETL tools which could be a major restriction and can also lead to vendor lock-in problems. |
Any ETL tool can be used along with tableau. This resolves the problem of vendor lock-in for many organizations. |
Data Models |
Out-of-the-Box data models are supported and this could be an advantage in some niche cases. |
There is no Out-of-the-Box data model which is available with the suite. |
Logging And Monitoring |
Error logging and messaging is poor, this makes working and development with the suite pretty difficult if something blows up. |
Issues are very rare. Has very detailed error and exception handling for the developer and user. |
Big Data |
Can handle and manage large business models very easily. It is fairly easy to scale it to large databases. |
Large data models can be handled offline or handled manually if it is not published online which could be a bit of challenge at times. |
Predictive Analysis Support |
No predictive analytics is provided as a part of the suite. |
Has the inbuilt capability of predictive analytics and integration to R language which could be a major plus when dealing with handling analytics logic. |
Wrapping Up
While both Tableau and Oracle BI are at par with each other, Tableau is rated slightly better on various platforms.
According to G2, reviewers preferred Tableau on the following accounts: ease of use and set-up. Data visualization is much simpler with Tableau. It also has the advantage of built-in Predictive Analysis and can connect to RStudio in the backend, a feature that is missing in Oracle BI.
When it comes to analytics of very large data, Oracle BI has an upper hand. It also compares well in terms of scalability.
BI has become critical for enterprises across domains. Both Oracle BI and Tableau have their pros and cons. The choice between these two equally good BI software will largely depend on the scale, complexity of data, and the objective of the enterprises towards BI implementation.
Opinions expressed by DZone contributors are their own.
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