Pentaho is a suite of open source business intelligence and analytics products, now offered and supported by Hitachi Data Systems since the June 2015 acquisition.
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SnapLogic
Score 8.7 out of 10
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SnapLogic is a cloud integration platform with a self-service capacity supported by over 450 prebuilt modifiable connectors. SnapLogic also offers real-time and batch integration processes for interfacing with external data sources, a drag-and-drop interface, and use of the vendors’ Iris AI.
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VisualCron
Score 7.0 out of 10
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VisualCron is an automation, Integration and Task Scheduler tool. VisualCron combines many features into one product. VisualCron was founded in 2004. Through scheduling users can set Jobs to run on a specific time or event with the help of Triggers. The Tasks in each Job automate scripts to eliminate human errors. Through various Tasks users can integrate different systems through file transfer, encryption, compression and…
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Pricing
Pentaho
SnapLogic
VisualCron
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Pentaho
SnapLogic
VisualCron
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
$1,499 per Server
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Pentaho
SnapLogic
VisualCron
Considered Multiple Products
Pentaho
No answer on this topic
SnapLogic
Verified User
Engineer
Chose SnapLogic
Snaplogic was much better than Boomi in the customer response time. In fact, this was one of the deal-breaker reasons. SnapLogic was better than Informatica in its ability to read directly from the sources/SFTP files instead of downloading them. Pentaho is great, but we wanted …
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.
Snaplogic is unique from other IPASS tools if you're very sensitive about data security as they have an on-premise option where your data never needs to leave your data center. And data pipelines can be quickly created if Snaplogic has the requisite connector to your data sources. On the downside, if you're transforming a large amount of data for example in training machine learning models, a tool with elastic compute capability is more appropriate.
VisualCron does accommodate continuous file processing. Like packing and unpacking compressed files, splitting or merging files, sending E-mail's and executing queries on databases. VisualCron in less suitable for performing very complex operations on files like, arithmetic with numbers, dates or amounts. Very complex job scripts become cluttered. Debugging Job scripts is not easy.
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.
VisualCron should more specifically indicate the root cause of an error.
If copying a file goes wrong, VisualCron reports 'can't copy file'. I expect 'no read permissions from original' or 'no write permissions from destination'.
VisualCron offers no way to execute a Job script line by line
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
This has been hands down the BEST software company I have ever used and dealt with. I am a 25 year IT veteran at this college. They go above and beyond in soliciting our feedback/input and proactively follow up about bugs, issues, etc. I have given multiple potential clients my thoughts and after seeing the SL demo they all sign up. I appreciate their support model, it's REFRESHING!
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.
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.
They can be prompt but they have not been as useful as I've wanted. We had a bug that affected many of our customers through an API connection between SnapLogic and our platform. Eventually they were able to figure it out, but it took a long time of negotiating between our engineering team and theirs. Additionally, we installed the SnapLogic groundplex for our customers and we've run into a bunch of problems of connectivity. If SnapLogic offered to be on those calls with our clients to troubleshoot how to fix these problems, I would give them a better grade here.
Questions and problems can be addressed to VisualCron 's support department via E-mail. I usually get a good answer from them fairly quickly. There is also a VisualCron forum where you can ask questions that will be answered by other VisualCron users.
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.
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.
We opted for SnapLogic due its ease of use and the flexibility it offers, it was the platform that was strongest in both application integration and data integration and both were use cases we wanted to be able to cover.
For simple processes, VisualCron is easier to use and maintain. For complicated processes, Quadient Inspire offers more options. The graphical representations of waiting, running or completed jobs is adequate for both products. The logging of job actions is better in Quadient Inpire as in VisualCron.
