When I was five, I asked for two action figures for Christmas. It was all I really wanted. Since my parents had more kindness than bleak, existentialist irony, I got a lot more Christmas morning. That day I internalized the meaning of reverse psychology.

I’m not just boring you with this anecdote because it’s St. Nicholas’ Day. I’m also doing it because it demonstrates that when you narrow your list down, you get a lot of value in return.

In that (and the Christmas) spirit, I’m narrowing this post to look at SAP vs. Oracle’s business intelligence software options. Sure, there are hundreds of BI vendors out there, but these giants offer an impressive range of functions and a lot of proven successes.

Oracle OBIEE

Here’s an easy way to gauge Oracle’s success in three steps:

Go to the Capterra business intelligence software directory

Search (hit ctrl + f; yes, I’m explaining how to do this, I’d have to for my mom, so I’m doing it here) for “Oracle”

Note that half of the results are companies explaining that their programs integrate with Oracle

Go to 0:54 to get the joke. It’s a little involved. Point is, Oracle’s powerful.

As a long-established player in the BI software market, Oracle’s had the time to develop an impressive range of features like ad hoc analysis, issue indicators, predictive analytics, cloud connectivity, and even advanced analytics features like financial forecasting. The three main, overarching BI products they sell are Business Intelligence 12c, Oracle Cloud Service, and Oracle Data Visualization Cloud Service.

I had the chance to speak with Jose Villacis of Oracle about Oracle’s business intelligence software, or OBIEE, as it’s colloquially known. While he was enthusiastic about all of Oracle’s options, his advice for SMB’s would be to start with Oracle Cloud Service. He argues that the subscription-based pricing model is both more financially palatable and easier to work with. When you use the cloud, factors like hosting or a data center are, according to Villacis, “All done for you, and you don’t have to worry about patching or maintenance in the future.” Thus, the cloud removes any worries about, say, hauling the IT people out of bed at 3 AM in case there’s a server problem.

Reviewers of Oracle’s BI solutions are particularly impressed by its integration, ad hoc analysis, and visualization capabilities. Jose Villacis called attention to one particular visualization capability: Oracle’s storytelling tool. “You build a visualization in the product, and the software builds a storyboard out of it, that exists” across all the Oracle BI products you use. It ties into another of Oracle’s priorities, which also happens to be an important feature of any good BI program: “we want to help organizations develop their collective intelligence, because [BI is] all about collaboration.” Collaboration that can pull your data out of silos, and your insights into the open.

I’m piggybacking off of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence (paywall protected, but you can’t afford to miss it) in focusing on Lumira, but it’s a heck of a piggy to back. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for 2016 chose to focus on a mix of Sap Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence as this pairing met Gartner’s requirements for “a modern, business-user-centric BI platform.”

Lumira comes in desktop and server versions; they discontinued their cloud version this past September. If you want to use Lumira with BusinessObjects, however, you’ll want to go with the Lumira Desktop edition. With Lumira Desktop, you’ll have such features as the ability to create and edit storyboards, data transformation and data combining, and the chance to either upload spreadsheets (.csv or .xlsx files), or more other, more complex data sources (big data, relational, or SAP HANA). Functionality’s actually one of the top reasons customers go with Lumira, according to Gartner research.

Lumira averages four out of five stars both at Capterra and at Gartner Peer Reviews. Reviewers especially like Lumira’s ease of setup, and its shallow learning curve. I could say more about Lumira’s simplicity, but here’s some quotes from the reviewers themselves:

“ I found it very easy to work with and understand”

“The most positive aspect is that it’s easy to install and get started”

“ Lumira’s functionality is very straightforward, allowing you to quickly run up the learning curve”

“Very easy to use”

“Pro: ease of use”

Again, the Magic Quadrant supports the reviews, noting that Lumira got an “above-average” score in the “ease-of-use” category. In other words, learning Lumira is like learning to drive an automatic transmission.

The choice between the two is tough. Both options have successful histories, and both can help SMB’s meet their goals. Both have major clients: Oracle provides solutions for the entire University of Wisconsin system, and SAP handles BI for Fedex. In the end, though, I’d probably lean towards SAP, given their greater focus on the qualities that constitute a modern BI platform, like business-user-centric data discovery. Of the 24 vendors in the magic quadrant, SAP “reported the highest percentage of use for governed data discovery use cases, followed by decentralized analytics.” Given how difficult a hurdle successful adoption is, that sort of successful encouragement of new users is a high priority.

Conclusion

Are you a happy (or unhappy) user of either program? If so, what do you like (or dislike)? Let me know in the comments below. Better yet, post a review of your software.