Oracle BI Vs Tableau - Which Business Intelligence Tool Is Best For Your Business?

Business intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, robotics, and cloud computing have revolutionized the way we view, perceive, and process information. While development is still ongoing in some of these cutting-edge areas, business intelligence (BI) has become universally applicable across functions and sectors. According to a poll, 48% of organizations believe that cloud BI is "critical" or "very important" to their future ambitions for boosting corporate productivity.

This popularity has given rise to wide-scale adoption of business intelligence tools across multiple industries and it’s not just a claim, the data revealed that companies are not only adopting BI but also finding new ways BI tools could be used to empower their decision-making. A report shows that 86% of enterprises have launched advanced analytics to accelerate their decision-making. With this rapid global adoption of BI, it is expected that by 2025 the global business intelligence market will grow to $33.3 billion. 

While these statistics clearly show that businesses know the potential of BI analytics and are more than ready to invest their resources in business analytics, the problem that most businesses face is choosing the right BI tool for their operations.

In this article, we are going to solve this very problem by comparing the most popular and widely used BI tools, i.e.: Oracle BI vs Tableau. We will dive into the pros and cons of both Oracle BI and Tableau and will discuss in detail when to choose which. Before that, let’s start with What is Business Intelligence? And Why is it so important?

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is using technology to help people and organizations make smarter decisions based on all relevant information available. For example, many businesses rely on BI software like PowerBI (Microsoft's business analytics tool) to do predictive analysis by using data from a variety of sources such as social media sites or customer feedback surveys that can allow them to see patterns in consumer behavior with enough time for adjustments before it becomes costly.

Business intelligence causes less confusion when you think about what they are: A way for companies to get more out of their existing investments in popular technologies while maintaining competitive advantage through new insights into how best to serve customers' needs and wants.

Also Read: Data Science Vs Business Intelligence: Does Your Company Need The Science Or The Intelligence?

Why is Business Intelligence Important for Businesses?

The world is your oyster regarding data analysis. The possibilities are all the more exciting given how new and rapidly changing they can be! One way of wrapping your head around these capabilities, to put them into practice for a particular job function or business domain, is by thinking about questions and answers.

So what can I do with BI, you might ask? Well, let's say a marketer wants to know something about one of their customer segments' behavior based on certain variables. Perhaps they want to understand if the weather affects how much people buy from them in any given month and whether it affects shipping times. With these kinds of questions, BI provides credible answers that are valuable for making better decisions or understanding things more deeply than before!

This approach can be strategy-oriented but also results-oriented. BI is a great way to analyze data to produce metrics by which the business units measure themselves and make decisions about their goals, as well as information that they share with each other for new insights into how different departments are operating.

Now that you know what BI is and How important it is for your business, you may ask how to implement business intelligence? The best way to practically implement business intelligence is by using BI tools easily available in the market. We will now shed light on the two most commonly used BI tools, i.e.: Oracle BI vs Tableau.

Oracle BI vs Tableau - A Quick Comparison

Although there are many tools available in the market, our focus in this article will be on Oracle BI and Tableau.

Oracle BI 

Oracle has been steadily expanding its Oracle Analytics Cloud offering. The company's flagship Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, launched in 2014, was the first product to use this technology. But it wasn't until 2020 that they finally added their HCM (human capital management) cloud, which allows HR professionals and analysts alike access to self-service personal intelligence analytics. It offers powerful reporting, and machine learning capabilities, as well as key features such as data preparation, and visualization of predictive analytics for all people on your team who need them without sinking hours into trying to make sense out of raw numbers across a spreadsheet or pivot table; native mobile app.

Pros and Cons of Oracle BI

Pros	Cons
Good Scalability.	Not an ideal product for visualization. Better options are available in cloud versions.
Good for Analysis purposes (instead of reporting).	Data Modelling is a little complex.
Can connect to multiple sources and integrate data on its own.	Too many system requirements.
Can directly report on transactional data as and when required, using BI Publisher Reporting or Direct Database Requests.	The architecture of this tool is a little complicated for a fresher to understand since it has too many layers.
Works best with Enterprise Data warehouse Models.	Requires skilled database background users.
Works with Relational and Non Relational data models.	Not good for running huge reports with huge data sets being returned.
Easiness of creating ad-hoc reports by business users. Gives them the freedom to create reports of their own for daily activities. Mobile is supported.	Even though using BI publisher one can do transactional reporting, it is NOT advised to do it on a large scale.
Report Scheduling is available for the users to receive automated reports delivered to their emails by agents.	Too many concurrent users and long-running queries can crash the servers. For that, hardware requirements for the in-premise applications must be done properly and enough hard disk and temp spaces must be allocated.
A lot of visualizations are available to suit the business needs.	Support is not quick and most of the time it takes a long time to provide solutions to even high-priority tickets.
A lot of runtimes and complex calculations can be made in the metadata layer (repository) or in the reporting layer that can not be handled in ETL processes.	No In-Memory data.
Prompts, Navigation, dynamic filters, and different options for selecting different formats of the reports also make it user-friendly.	It's expensive.
Extremely Robust security processes for authentication and authorizations.
An easy upgrade is possible from lower to higher versions.

 

Tableau

Tableau is a BI tool with amazing features that make it easy for users to do data analysis and visualization. It has many unique functions, all of which help put the user’s work front and center; you never lose sight of what your goal in Tableau Desktop is: getting results!

Makes sense right? Let's look at some more cool stuff about this remarkable BI tool!

Tableau lets people explore their data by using different charts or graphs. You can also create maps, and dashboards based on your needs, as well as story points through interactive narratives—all from one platform (pretty neat!).  With so much innovative technology integrated into just one product, it makes sense why Tableau software doesn't come cheap.

Pros and Cons of Tableau BI

Pros	Cons
Probably the best visualization tool currently in the market.	Tableau does not provide the feature of automatic refreshing of the reports with the help of scheduling.
It is a stable solution.	Tableau is not a completely open tool. Unlike other tools like Power 81, developers can create custom visuals that can be easily imported from Tableau.
Easy in developing visualizations.	Tableau's conditional formatting and limited 16-column-table displays are pain points for users.
Easy for business users to comprehend and develop their own reports.	Static and single value parameters. No Multi-value option is available.
Ease-to-use and easy drag-and-drop features make the user experience a big yes.	Improvements in security features need to be there.
Tableau's licensing is pretty straightforward and simple.	No conditional formatting is present like in OBIEE.
Everyone can use the free Tableau Viewer.	The data preparation/blending options are very basic.
Quickly Create Interactive visualizations.	Complex calculations can't really be done like in OBIEE.
Tableau can handle millions of rows of data with ease.	Tableau is an expensive solution.
To avoid performance issues and to do complex table calculations in Tableau, users can incorporate Python or R	Tableau is strictly a visualization tool. Tableau Desktop allows you to do very basic preprocessing. This includes joining and blending data.
Mobile Support and Responsive Dashboard.	The layout of the dashboards gets disturbed if the Tableau developer's screen resolution is different from the end user's screen resolution.

Oracle BI vs Tableau - When to Choose Which

Oracle BI (OBIEE)

OBIEE is designed for the complex analytical needs of an organization. It's a powerful tool to slice and dice data, create compelling dashboards, prompt users with filters based on their specific interests or requirements and provide comparison across multiple variables that can turn large amounts of raw stats into something more meaningful much faster than other tools available in today's business landscape.

Tableau

Tableau is the perfect tool for visualizing data and should be your software of choice when it's the only thing you need. Tableau offers a simple way to turn raw numbers into useful information that will help in making quick business decisions about how best to use your valuable resources.

Oracle BI vs Tableau - Final Verdict

Tableau offers excellent data visualization and self-service capabilities, whereas OBIEE is strong in its ability to connect with databases. To get the best of both worlds, try using Tableau for easily digestible visualizations that can be quickly analyzed by pulling up all sorts of charts without being a programmer or statistician. Add on top of this powerful connectivity from OBIEE which enables you to access any database source imaginable!

I hope you like this detailed comparison of Oracle BI vs Tableau.
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