Choosing InetSoft Style Intelligence Over Oracle BI

Are you evaluating Oracle as a BI provider, and wondering about alternatives? When recently placed head to head in ratings by tech research firm G2 Crowd, InetSoft won in a majority of categories, beating Oracle in 78% of individual ratings.

G2 Crowd is a Chicago based company that provides reviews on other companies' software products, targeting the CRM and marketing automation markets. It prides itself on being an unbiased platform where real users share their feedback. Data from peer reviews, web traffic, and other social media data from LinkedIn, Twitter etc. are fed into a formula that gives more weight to peer reviews over others.

The ratings are categorized based on the visual, analytical, procedural and advanced capabilities of the software. Below is a breakdown of the various categories in which InetSoft outranked Oracle, and the reasons why.

InetSoft's Style Intelligence leads the way in the general and user-interface aspect of the ratings, winning in categories such as Ease of use, Ease of setup, Quality of Support, Meeting Requirements, and Ease of Admin. Whether the end user is a non-technical business user or a power user building data mashups and white label customizations, Style Intelligence offers a wide range of functionalities in its dashboards, charts, reports, visual analyses, and predictive analytics.

It's intuitive tools allows for a layman to experiment with the software and easily create a dashboard or a report that fits their informational needs. Also, customer support at the business and technical level is reported as top notch.

Oracle scores lower than InetSoft in ease of use and setup because most find it to have a steep learning curve that requires the end user to be tech savvy. Although it has great integration capabilities with Siebel, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, BI Publisher and other ERP/CRM systems, the software does not always work with non-oracle data sources and is often reported as clunky and outdated.

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An Alternative to Oracle with First Class Reports

Another category where InetSoft leads the way is Reports, outscoring Oracle in Steps to Answer, Dashboards, Data Transformation and Report Design. InetSoft's strength lies in the use of a single meta data layer which pulls in data in real-time from a plethora of disparate sources. Whenever the data in one of these sources changes, those changes are immediately reflected on reports and dashboards. The software also allows for the automatic scheduling on reports, so an administrator can "set it and forget it".

InetSoft's robust data mashup technology can even accommodate last minute data integrated from an uploaded spreadsheet, ensuring that reports and analyses never leave out any relevant information. In addition to flexibility in data integration, the freedom to customize the InetSoft portal to include company branding, even allowing for the possibility to oem the InetSoft portal as part of a proprietary software tool, earned InetSoft a high rating of 8.4 in Customization.

Beating Oracle BI in Data Visualization and Big Data Services

InetSoft has a higher rating of 8.2 under Performance and Reliability. Data access happens in real time by default. Since this is not always possible with large volumes of data, it is managed with data caching and pre-aggregation techniques. InetSoft's data grid cache technology can be set to cache data every hour, every day or any interval of time that suits the organization's needs.

InetSoft also scores big under Data visualization and Big Data Services. InetSoft allows for filters, sliders, calendars, tabbed interfaces, tabled data displays and dynamic dashboards, where data can be interacted with directly. It has been highly rated for calculated fields, data column filtering and data search and discovery. InetSoft's dashboard and visualization software can access big data sources such as Apache Spark, Cloudera, Hadoop, MapR, and SAP HANA.

Although Oracle BI is a powerful tool if installed and configured properly and can be set up with differing levels of security, it has a heavy overhead as the cost is per user. With limited user licenses, there is a wait for designated members to write reports. Inetsoft's Style Intelligence, on the other hand, can be paid for per CPU for large deployments, and annual subscriptions are also available, giving an option for every type of business model.

We list the areas where InetSoft Style Intelligence scored over Oracle BI. Please click here or the G2 logo to go over the individual reviews.

Ratings

Meets Requirements

Ease of Use

Ease of Setup

Ease of Admin

Quality of Support

Ease of Doing Business With

Product Direction (% Positive)

Self Service

Calculated Fields

Data Column Filtering

Data Discovery

Collaboration/Workflow

Automodeling

Platform

Sandbox / Test Environments

Customization

User, Role, and Access Management

Performance and Reliability

Feature

Reports

Steps to Answer

Score Cards

Dashboards

Building Reports

Data Transformation

Data Modeling

WYSIWYG Report Design

Integration APIs

Advanced Analytics

Data Visualization

Big Data Services

About InetSoft

Since 1996 InetSoft has been delivering easy, agile, and robust business intelligence software that makes it possible for organizations and solution providers of all sizes to deploy or embed full-featured business intelligence solutions. InetSoft solutions have been deployed at over 5,000 organizations worldwide, including 25% of Fortune 500 companies, spanning all types of industries. InetSoft was ranked among the top 5 BI vendors in Gleanster's customer survey report.

Read why choosing InetSoft's cloud-flexible BI provides advantages over other BI options.