Boomi vs. Pentaho vs. Workato

Legacy systems often need to be replaced or integrated with new applications in order to modernize businesses. A strong API strategy that avoids custom coding and third-party programs is essential to enable this integration. Boomi's new-age connectivity and integration solutions ensure safe, secure, and robust integration. In the age of information, businesses are under more pressure than ever to be able to collect and manage large amounts of data. This data comes in from a variety of sources, including personalized devices such as voice assistants and wearable tech. While this data can be immensely valuable to businesses, they often lack the infrastructure necessary to handle it effectively. This can lead to data build-up in databases or silos, and can eventually lead to problems with integration and security.

Pentaho is very well suited to perform data extraction & data mining from various cloud storage & transform that data using various available data models. However, the software struggles when it comes to visualizing the extracted data in an appealing manner & can be difficult for end-users to get an understanding of data tables created using those models.

Incentivized

Workato is brilliant to make separate applications work together without much effort or specialists being needed. When specific events on software A should trigger actions on B (or more) and you want that to happen without any development or big budgets, that's where Workato comes into play. It's a great help if you want tasks automated, communications flowing and data synced between different applications.

• Pre-built connectors to almost anything which greatly reduce time to release of your integration needs.
• Easy to use development platform with drag&drop features. Non-technical people could build simple integration processes in no time.
• Great user community where you can get quick help if needed. Boomi people hang around there a lot.

Incentivized

• Integrate and synchronize with big data easily
• Import data from any sources and different databases
• Managing data in on-premise, hybrid and cloud environments.
• Compatibility and flexibility of the platform with any type of scenario and any business or industry
• Various tools in the software suite to transformation of data
• Simple interface appearance and creative UI graphics

• The Workato product interface is brilliantly thought through and designed. The learning curve for first timers is easy enough to get started and build useful things, and Workato really shines in their ability to handle complex triggers and interactions. Workato allows people to build software apps so much faster than by coding each functionality.
• Workato has fantastic documentation, making things accessible without any holes in the product. The product just works, never has any bugs, never lags, and just generally allows us to see and change exactly what we need to.
• Workato has an absolutely amazing support team. We tried the free version for a while, then realized it was the single most important software tool we have, and we upgraded. The support at the paid tier is A+, seriously the best from any company we've worked with. Feels more like a good friend then a support rep.

• More from a development perspective. It is always difficult to use the properties features. It takes a while to understand how the data/variables can be used across an integration.
• Dell Boomi should also invest more on API Management and not just seen as a ETL,ESB tool.
• Should roll out features more often based on users reviews.

Incentivized

• I think the relative obscurity of the tool is a downside, not as many developers, consultants or peers you can tap into.
• Lack of a solid user community held us back, looking at Power BI and Qlik, they have huge user communities that help each other out. Would have liked that here.
• Smaller company means smaller sales force, and the lack of a local presence made it hard to only interact online with the account rep. Other companies have someone local who often stops by with pre-sales developers to just pitch in free of charge when they have time.

Incentivized

• Customer support - responsive, but often not equipped to help efficiently identify root cause of issue. Need to improve escalation to technical resources and turnaround time
• Recipe organization and sharing. Can be challenging to copy recipes, or grab recipes from publicly available site. There are often dependencies and errors that have vague descriptions.

Incentivized

Dell Boomi has provided us with the ability to connect our campus together using our various existing platforms. There are many supported features and have yet to run into something that we cannot do. Its user interface is very intuitive which would allow users to begin developing fairly easily. There is a myriad of resources available

Incentivized

I will use Pentaho until I find a better tool with a better, easier to use report designer client. For now, Pentaho has been the most powerful reporting tool for our clients because of its ability to connect to Odoo, integrate in Odoo (reports are accessible in Odoo) and the flexibility in report design and parameter integration

Incentivized

We need to develop Enterprise Application Integrations and Workato was not designed for this

My IT and Finance teams have noted that setting up the tool is a breeze. Dell Boomi has never caused an issue during a system implementation that I am aware of. We are pleased with the tool and recommend others consider it.

Incentivized

The Pentaho tools are designed so you can start playing around on your own. Of course, you will need guidance at some point, but the training teams are good at guiding new users, and the online documentation is usually pretty up-to-date.

Some of the tools, such as the Pentaho Data Integration tool and the Pentaho Server, are pretty self-explanatory. The other tools maybe are not so quickly and obvious to use, but again, with some documentation and some customer support, you can find your way around them.

Incentivized

The sheer work Workato eliminates from people's daily jobs is simply a great contribution to people's productivity and a boost to capability. It actually strikes the balance between business and tech teams. It also reduces dependency on developers, and speeds up their delivery too. The only reason it's not a full 10/10 is for the price - it's a bit expensive for what we'd like, and their batch or high data volume processing can be improved.

The atom sphere takes a time to load, when I open a process or when I open a log. One more slow processing is when I import objects from NetSuite.

About the performance of processing, it looks like Boomi takes a time to initialize some things such as connectors before starting the process. This is also performance we have.

Incentivized

Boomi support was responsive and knowledgable, however being a closed cloud service, it doesn't have good community support. We found the learning curve to be steep and there aren't avenues like google, forums, or blogs that provide community driven insight into the product or how to go about designing solutions using the tool

Incentivized

They were responsive to our questions when we raised issues. They gave us workarounds when required. They were quite knowledgeable when it came to issue analysis and providing fixes. They were forthright in informing us if a bug was not due for release soon.

Incentivized

They employ an extremely knowledgeable team of problem solvers. I've never had a disappointing interaction or one that has left me still searching for answers. I know that when I ask for help, they'll partner with me until we find a solution together

Incentivized

Course Taken: DI1000 Pentaho Data Integration Fundamentals Setup A week before your class started, the instructor will start sending out class material and lab setup instructions. This is helpful so that you understand how the environment is laid out and can start reviewing the content. Ultimately it saved about a 1/2 day trying to setup with 10 other people online which was great! The Course The 3-day course was laid out like many other technical classes with 15-30 minutes instruction and 15-60 minutes of lab exercises. The instructor was very knowledgeable with the functionality from version to version and answered questions as we went along. I was amazed at some of the functionality that was available that I was not using at the time and quickly implemented changes to many existing transformations and jobs. The novice users seemed to catch on quickly and more experienced users explained how some of the functionality was used in their home environments. Towards the end there was enough time so that we were able to ask very directed questions about our own environments. Overall, I really found the class to be informative and deliver enough information to be dangerous. My skills improved and I was able to design better and efficient transformations for the HIE. Course Description: https://training.pentaho.com/instructor-led-training/pentaho-data-integration-fundamentals-di1000

Get the right people in before starting implementation. Start small and build as you go approach is time consuming and involves lot of rework. Evangalize within the organization the capabilities and limitations equally so that correct delivery expectations are set. Set expectations with the Customer that the tool cannot replace proprietary software in terms of stability/usability and that timelines could change given the new ness of the product.

Incentivized

We discovered that we could not use Workato for our more complex, large enterprise integrations. It was useful for simple workflows that matched the prebuilt recipes.

We decided to go with Dell Boomi because another department in our company was already using the software. We did not research competitor applications to use as our business solution. Dell Boomi was very easy and quick to set up, so once we decided to use Dell Boomi for systems integration, we had it set up and running within a few working days.

Incentivized

Since the Pentaho platform offers a range of broad functionality across data preparation and advanced analytics, it also can be easily integrated to support many data sources and machine-learning frameworks. Based on that fact, we selected Pentaho to be used in our internal department. It also supports many of our BI use cases as required by company management or the business user. Last but not least, the Pentaho license is cheaper than their competitor.

Incentivized

We already used Zapier, but since it doesn't support NetSuite we had to choose another automation platform. Now that we've been using Workato for a few months, we have plans to move the stuff we're going through Zapier to Workato. We set up a trial account with all the other platforms, and they were all more expensive and A LOT more complicated than Workato.

• It has allowed us to scale significantly without having to add headcount, specifically those geared towards data entry. We went from a $10m ARR business to $200m ARR business with the same amount of Order Processors and 12x amount of transactions by leveraging Boomi to perform a lot of the work, and then having the Order Processing team to simply review that the transaction was processed successfully.

Incentivized

• Pentaho has improved our overall business process.
• Pentaho has helped the Managers and Directors to analyze the numbers going up and down from time to time.
• We have a started a big project using Pentaho that is going to include all the business processes in the organization.

Incentivized

• As business consultants, Workato has greatly improved our offerings to our clients as well as improved the time frame to implement automated workflows and integrations.
• For our clients, the return on investment is almost immediate. Once a Workato recipe is up and running (which can be done very fast), data is integrating, duplicate data entry and user errors are eliminated, and cross-company KPI metrics are easier to report than ever.